Scientist

How to spell scientist

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce scientist

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scientist mean?

1. nounA person who studies or has expert knowledge of a branch of science, especially through systematic research and experiment.

Scientist in a sentence

• The scientist recorded each measurement carefully in her notebook.

• Every scientist on the team published findings in the journal.

Where does scientist come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb scire, which simply meant 'to know', and its noun scientia, meaning 'knowledge'. From scientia English already had the word 'science' by the 1300s, borrowed through Old French, originally covering knowledge of any organised kind. The agent noun 'scientist' is surprisingly modern: it was deliberately coined in 1833 by the English philosopher William Whewell, who wanted a single label for practitioners of natural knowledge, just as 'artist' served the arts. Whewell built it from the 'scient-' stem plus the familiar '-ist' ending, and the term gradually replaced older phrases like 'man of science'. The silent 'c' in the opening 'sci-' is the spelling trap, a direct inheritance from that Latin scire, where the letters were once both pronounced.

How the word is built

• scient- (from Latin sciens/scientia: knowing, knowledge, from scire 'to know')
• -ist (one who practises)