means A person who delivers religious sermons and exhorts others toward faith and moral living, typically as a Christian minister or evangelist.

from From the verb 'preach,' which came into English through Old French 'prechier,' itself from Latin 'praedicare' — to proclaim or declare publicly, built from 'prae-' (before, in front of) and 'dicare' (to announce). The agent suffix '-er' simply turns the act into the person: the one who does the proclaiming. So a preacher is, quite literally, a public declarer — long before pulpits, the same Latin root gave us 'predict' and 'predicate,' all kin in the family of saying things out loud and with authority.