Other forms: scientists
A scientist is a person who does experiments to discover how the world works. A research scientist, scientists say, become a scientist.
The word is younger than the thing: it was coined in 1834 by William Whewell, who thought that people studying nature needed a name of their own the way an artist has one. Before that they were natural philosophers. Most of the work is reading, arguing and failing rather than discovering. Note science, scientific.
1nounscientistA person who does experiments to discover how the world works.
“The scientists spent years studying how the virus spreads.”
scientist is a researcher.
Also accepted in games: researcher
Coined by William Whewell in 1834, from science plus -ist, on the model of artist. Science comes from Latin scire, to know.
Built from
coined by Q333922 in March 1834 in an anonymous review of Mary Somerville's book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences in the Quarterly Review as a suggested replacement for, and later seriously introduced by him in 1840 (see the quotation) as a more precise substitute for, the terms natural philosopher and man of science. Modeled after artist, from the Latin - stem scientia (“knowledge”) -ist.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA