physicist
Americannoun
-
physicists
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of physicist
Explanation
A physicist is a scientist who studies and is trained in physics, which is the study of nature, especially how matter and energy behave. Do you ever wonder how things work? If you're interested in what makes magnets attract iron or what's happening in atoms, then maybe you should become a physicist. Physicists study physics, which is related to the word physical. Physicists are interested in everything that physically exists, from tiny gadgets to massive stars. It takes many years of school to become a physicist, and physicists work on complex projects such as space travel and new energy sources.
Vocabulary lists containing physicist
Albert Einstein
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Bomb
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The Subtle Knife
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
A new scientific investigation suggests the Nazi nuclear program was much further from success than its leading physicist claimed.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 16, 2026
The chemistry prize follows the physics prize, which on Tuesday honoured Belgian physicist Francis Halzen for groundbreaking work using Antarctic ice to capture particles originating in the distant cosmos.
From Barron's ● Oct. 7, 2026
Belgian particle physicist Francis Halzen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to astronomy and his work on the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 6, 2026
Belgian physicist Prof Francis Halzen has won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work on an observatory that detects particles from space, shedding light on the distant universe.
From BBC ● Oct. 6, 2026
To a physicist, mass and weight are two quite different things.
From "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
The result changes the usual way physicists think about the vacuum.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 3, 2026
Wang grew up in New Mexico, where his parents worked as physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the famous site of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s work on the Manhattan Project.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 2, 2026
For about 40 years, physicists have used conformal field theories to calculate how far apart those energy rungs should be.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 1, 2026
Some physicists have proposed that new physics or an undiscovered symmetry could explain this difference.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 23, 2026
Ultimately, most physicists hope to find a unified theory that will explain all four forces as different aspects of a single force.
From "A Brief History of Time: And Other Essays" by Stephen Hawking
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
