taxonomist

American  

[taks-ah-nuhm-ist] / tæksˈɑ nəm ɪst /

noun

taxonomists plural

1. an expert or practitioner in taxonomy, especially in biology.

---

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• non-taxonomist
  noun

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• taxonomists
  plural

Explanation

A taxonomist is a biologist that groups organisms into categories. A plant taxonomist for example, might study the origins and relationships between different types of roses while an insect taxonomist might focus on the relationships between different types of beetles. A taxonomist is not to be confused with a taxidermist, a person who specializes in the stuffing and mounting of dead animals. It's true, both words share their origins in the Greek taxis meaning "arrangement." But in the case of a taxonomist, it's not dead animals that are being arranged, it's hierarchies of species.

Example Sentences

The spider was first spotted by Professor Greg Anderson, a biomedical researcher who is also a spider taxonomist and photographer.

From Science Daily • Jun. 26, 2026

Most of us have heard of the 18th-century taxonomist Carl Linnaeus and his systems of categorization; less familiar is his rival, the French mathematician and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon.

From New York Times • Apr. 25, 2024

Jackson Means, a millipede taxonomist at the Virginia Museum of Natural History, told Undark he had only seen similar conditions in an alcohol collection that had been left unattended in a warehouse for 22 years.

From Salon • Jul. 7, 2023

Of that creature, a British taxonomist named Oldfield Thomas wrote in 1888 that “no zoologist has dared to describe it.”

From Washington Post • Apr. 11, 2023

Mendel, as we shall see, was an instinctual gardener—a breeder of plants, a counter of seeds, an isolator of traits; Darwin was a garden digger—a classifier of plants, an organizer of specimens, a taxonomist.

From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee