specialist
Americannoun
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specialists
plural
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a person who is devoted to one subject or to one particular branch of a subject or pursuit.
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a medical practitioner who devotes attention to a particular class of diseases, patients, etc.
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U.S. Army. an enlisted person of one of four grades having technical or administrative duties, the grades corresponding to those of corporal through sergeant first class but not requiring the exercise of command.
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Stock Exchange. a member of an exchange who buys and sells a single stock or a particular group of stocks in their own name or for other stockbrokers and thus helps maintain the market in those securities on that exchange.
noun
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a person who specializes in or devotes himself to a particular area of activity, field of research, etc
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( as modifier )
specialist knowledge
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an enlisted rank in the US Army denoting technical qualifications that entitle the holder to a noncommissioned officer's pay
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ecology an organism that has special nutritional requirements and lives in a restricted habitat that provides these Compare generalist
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of specialist
Explanation
A specialist has an area of expertise in a profession or branch of learning. Call an ear, nose, and throat specialist if you can’t shake a stuffy nose, but go to a Shakespeare specialist to learn about King Lear. Specialist started off as a word used just for doctors who focused particular diseases or parts of the body, but now a specialist can be someone with a narrow focus in any field. A specialist is any professional with a specialty — lawyers are specialists because each lawyer deals with a specific kind of legal work. To be a specialist you have to study or get experience in a specific field for a long time.
Vocabulary lists containing specialist
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
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National Nurses Week: Hospital People and Places
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Things Not Seen
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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 Environment Agency-led clean-up operation began in June 2025 and has seen 2,500 lorry loads of waste removed from the woods by specialist contractors to a landfill site in Essex.
From BBC ● Oct. 9, 2026
"We know how to treat it," said Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at Toronto General Hospital.
From Barron's ● Oct. 8, 2026
“The single most important issue that I see, however, are older folks who get on GLP-1s,” said Nolan Fisher, a neck and back pain specialist at the Banner Health hospital system in Phoenix.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 8, 2026
Eventually, he brought in a defensive specialist for another perspective and they both appeared on camera.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 8, 2026
The seer was a specialist in the casting of twigs; he threw them on the ground, and made interpretations based on how they fell.
From "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho
Diesel hit a national average record of $6.528 a gallon in September, according to energy pricing specialists OPIS.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 8, 2026
Even Meta has had to offer more than 7 percent a year, while riskier cloud data center specialists have gone above 9 percent.
From Barron's ● Oct. 6, 2026
Dr. Randal Haworth was among the specialists creator Nely Galán recruited in 2003.
From Salon ● Oct. 1, 2026
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife once employed 13 specialists dedicated to resolving human-wildlife conflicts, but it let all but one of them go after funding ran dry in 2024.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 30, 2026
Ohmae’s company even has contracts with more than seventy thousand housewives, some of them specialists in medical or legal terminologies, to do data-entry work at home.
From "The World Is Flat" by Thomas L. Friedman
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.
