statistician

American  

[stat-i-stish-uhn] / ˌstæt ɪˈstɪʃ ən /

noun

1. an expert in or compiler of statistics.

---

statistician British  

/ ˌstætɪˈstɪʃən /

noun

1. a person who specializes in or is skilled at statistics

2. a person who compiles statistics

---

Etymology

Origin of statistician

First recorded in 1815–25; statist(ics) + -ician

Explanation

Numbers, numbers and more numbers. A statistician is a math expert who uses huge amounts of data to figure out how likely it is that something will happen, like your chances of winning the lottery. See the word statistics in statistician? A statistician is an expert in the field of statistics, something you hear or see every day — the percentage of Americans who have cell phones, or how likely you are to be fit and healthy if you live in Oregon are statistics. The people who figure these things out are statisticians.

Example Sentences

Senior government statistician Yu Weining said Monday that Beijing’s front-loaded proactive policy measures helped lift industrial profit.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 27, 2026

In September, Beijing’s Tsinghua University poached Su Fei, one of Intel’s leading chip architects, and Liu Jun, a prominent statistician and data scientist at Harvard University.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 19, 2026

The limitation around death “really complicates the interpretation of what the market is doing,” says Harry Crane, a Rutgers statistician who sits on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Innovation Advisory Committee.

From Barron's • Mar. 2, 2026

Gelman’s examples include a claim offered in the book “Freakonomics” that “beautiful parents are 36% more likely to have girl babies,” derived from a tortuous calculation by a British statistician.

From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 19, 2025

As statistician Persi Diaconis has shown, six to eight riffle shuffles are usually necessary.

From "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences" by John Allen Paulos