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:
The chemistry prize follows the physics prize, which on Tuesday honoured Belgian physicist Francis Halzen.
From Barron's ● Oct. 7, 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
Both then working at Chinese search giant Baidu, he recalls an application from a physicist and biologist with no engineering or AI background.
From Barron's ● Oct. 2, 2026
One example was the case of Chinese physicist Fang Lizhi, who took refuge in the U.S.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 22, 2026
At almost the same time the German physicist Werner Heisenberg came up with a competing theory called matrix mechanics.
From "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
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
If that were true, the Planck scale could be much closer to the energy scales physicists can experimentally reach.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 23, 2026
These collisions give physicists access to extremely small distance scales.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 23, 2026
Instead, it rules out one important version of that idea and gives physicists tighter boundaries for future theories connecting gravity with quantum mechanics.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 21, 2026
This expressly decreed that nothing could outrace the speed of light and yet here were physicists insisting that, somehow, at the subatomic level, information could.
From "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
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.
