A speechwriter is someone paid to write the speeches that another person will stand up and deliver as their own. Presidents, prime ministers, mayors, company bosses, and anyone else who must speak often and well hires one. The speaker gets the credit and the applause; the speechwriter stays invisible. That invisibility is part of the job, not a secret — everybody knows leaders have speechwriters, and nobody considers it cheating. Still, English keeps a slight edge available: if you want to suggest a politician has no thoughts of their own, you say 'that was his speechwriter talking'. Good speechwriters do more than arrange words. They have to learn one particular person's voice — their rhythms, their favourite phrases, the jokes they can land and the ones they cannot — and write so that nobody hears the writer. Some of the most famous lines in modern politics were written by people whose names almost nobody knows. In American usage it is one word, speechwriter; British writing sometimes hyphenates it as speech-writer, and both are accepted. The activity is 'speechwriting'.