anthropologist
Americannoun
-
anthropologists
plural
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of anthropologist
First recorded in 1790–1800; anthropolog(y) + -ist
Explanation
If you like to go people watching and enjoy studying the ways that humans behave, then you might be a future anthropologist. Anthropologists are people that practice anthropology, which is the study of humanity. Basically they want to figure out what makes humans human. An anthropologist might be interested in everything from the traditions of a tribe on a remote island to the culture of an urban community and everything in between. Biological anthropologists spend their time with fossils and artifacts trying to figure out how early humans might have behaved and what makes us different from other primates.
Vocabulary lists containing anthropologist
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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:
Until the early 1990s, the police kept a close eye on such funerals for fear of human sacrifices, according to the American anthropologist Janet Hoskins.
From Barron's ● Jul. 21, 2026
Zora Neale Hurston was a student of the anthropologist Franz Boas, and her fieldwork in rural Florida informs this novel of passionate love and tempestuous weather.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 19, 2026
Anoko, the WHO anthropologist, says it takes patience to help a community at a time like this.
From BBC ● Jun. 17, 2026
Dodd was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, and asked his friend Lockhart, a medical anthropologist, to help him figure out what brought him to his lowest moment.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 12, 2026
Being an anthropologist was my second career choice after musician in a punk band, so I studied Selena and her friends as if they were a newly discovered culture.
From "The First Rule of Punk" by Celia C. Pérez
FY: I think that architects and designers have to be anthropologists.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 13, 2026
Daniel Aliyu Kwali, president of the FCT Stakeholders' Assembly, noted that some anthropologists and historians say that communities have lived there for over 6,000 years.
From BBC ● Apr. 3, 2026
Once the zeal of republican liberty cooled, 19th-century universities provided homes to such scientists of sacrifice as ethnographers, philologists, sociologists, historians and anthropologists.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 25, 2026
A new study by anthropologists now presents strong evidence that Sahelanthropus tchadensis, a species first identified in the early 2000s, was capable of upright walking.
From Science Daily ● Jan. 3, 2026
Some philosophers and nearly all anthropologists agreed: standards of rationality were, they insisted, local and highly variable.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
Definitions 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.
