Economist

How to spell economist

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce economist

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does economist mean?

1. nounA person who studies or is an expert in economics, the production and distribution of wealth.

Economist in a sentence

• The bank hired a senior economist to forecast next year's interest rates.

• Every economist on the panel disagreed about the cause of the recession.

Where does economist come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek oikonomia, meaning 'household management', a compound built from oikos 'house' and nomos 'law' or 'rule', so the literal idea was the one who lays down the rules for running a household. Latin took it as oeconomia, and French passed it into English in the 1500s and 1600s, at first applied to thrifty domestic management before it widened to the management of a nation's resources. The noun 'economist' was coined from 'economy' plus the agent suffix '-ist', and by the eighteenth century it had settled on its modern meaning of someone who studies how wealth is produced and distributed. The same oikos root sits inside 'ecology', which describes the 'house' of nature, and 'ecumenical', which once meant pertaining to the whole inhabited house of the world. For spelling, it helps to remember the single c and single m, with the tricky unstressed schwa vowels in the middle that tempt writers to drop or double letters.

How the word is built

• econom- (from Greek oikonomia: household management)
• -ist (one who practises or studies)