Naturalist

How to spell naturalist

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce naturalist

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does naturalist mean?

1. nounA person who studies or is an expert in plants, animals, and the natural world.

Naturalist in a sentence

• The visiting naturalist identified every bird call along the riverbank.

• As a respected naturalist, she catalogued the region's insects for the museum.

Where does naturalist come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin natura, meaning 'birth' or 'the inborn character of a thing', which itself grew from natus, the past participle of nasci, 'to be born'. From natura English formed the adjective 'natural', and during the late 1500s the suffix -ist (the same ending found in 'scientist' and 'artist', marking a person who does or studies something) was added to produce 'naturalist'. Early on it could mean a person who studied the natural world rather than the supernatural, and by the 1600s it settled into its familiar sense of someone who studies plants, animals, and natural history. The shared natura root still links it to a whole family of everyday words such as 'nature', 'native', and 'innate'. The spelling trap is the quiet middle: writers must keep the full 'natural' intact (natur-AL-ist) and not collapse it into the false relative 'naturist', which means a nudist.

How the word is built

• natur- (from Latin natura: birth, nature)
• -al (adjective suffix: relating to)
• -ist (noun suffix: one who practises or studies)