Other forms: psychologists
A psychologist is someone trained to study how the mind works and to help people with what is going on inside theirs. The one who sits with you for fifty minutes and asks what happened last week; the one running a memory experiment in a university lab.
The field is psychology and the adjective is psychological. Two things trip learners up. A psychologist is not a psychiatrist: the psychiatrist is a medical doctor who can prescribe drugs, while the psychologist works through talking and testing. And plenty of psychologists never treat anyone at all — they work in sport, in schools, in advertising, in the design of aircraft cockpits. The p is silent and the stress falls on the second syllable: psy-CHOL-o-gist.
1nounpsychologistA person trained in the study of the mind and behaviour.
“The psychologist ran a study on how children remember faces.”
2nounprofessionalA professional who helps people with emotional or mental difficulties through talking and testing rather than medicine.
“She has been seeing a psychologist since the accident.”
psychologist is a trained professional.
Also accepted in games: therapist
Ancient Greek
ψυχή — soul
la-ren
psychologia
French
psychologie
English
psychology
English, today
psychologist
Built from
From psychology + -ist. psychology comes from French psychologie, from la-ren psychologia, from Ancient Greek ψυχή (“soul”) + -λογία (“study of”), equivalent to psycho- + -logy. The Latin term is believed by some to have been coined in a lost treatise by Croatian humanist Marko Marulić (1450–1524), but this is disputed by other scholars. It is 1570s, at which time it was apparently already current, and may be a Hellenization of the established expression dē animā (“on the soul”) in titles.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA