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physicist

nounattested in dialogue

  • United States//ˈfɪzɪsɪst//

A person whose occupation specializes in the science of physics, especially at a professional level.

noun

  1. 1

    A person whose occupation specializes in the science of physics, especially at a professional level.

    Thus we may say, that while the Naturalist employs principally the ideas of resemblance and life, the Physicist proceeds upon the ideas of force, matter, and the properties of matter.

    Physicists find themselves called in to deal with such varied problems as the reduction of noise in diesel railcars, investigation of the Hertzian stresses set up by wheel-rail contact and improvement of the insulation of fish and banana vans.

  2. 2

    archaicA believer in the theory that the fundamental phenomena of life are to be explained upon purely chemical and physical principles (opposed to vitalist).

Etymology

From physics + -ist. Coined by the English polymath William Whewell (1794–1866) in his book The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840): see the quotation.

Forms

plural
physicists
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).