noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of theorist
Explanation
Someone who considers given facts and comes up with a possible explanation is called a theorist. Theorists observe various phenomena and use reasoning to come up with practical ideas that must be proven. Theorists come up with abstract ideas and then spend their lives trying to prove them. Perhaps the most famous theorist was Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity is arguably the most famous ever presented. Still, an idea can always be disputed until proven, and theorists are often scoffed at. Einstein himself once said, "No one but a theorist believes his theory; everyone puts faith in a laboratory result but the experimenter himself."
Vocabulary lists containing theorist
Florida's B.E.S.T. Common Suffixes: -ist
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Selection Vocabulary 3, Unit 1
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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 next, he is reflecting on the ideas of theorist Stuart Hall and the ways individuals can resist hegemony.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 20, 2026
Further outside the industry is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a self-taught theorist who has spent two decades arguing that a sufficiently powerful AI would wipe out humanity.
From Barron's ● Sep. 15, 2026
I suggested he sounded like a conspiracy theorist, implying the whole world was out to get him.
From BBC ● Sep. 3, 2026
The influencer said when people find out that she listens to Owens, they often mock her and call her a conspiracy theorist.
From Salon ● Aug. 26, 2026
Their approaches to physics were divergent: Lawrence was an experimentalist nonpareil, Teller a profoundly intuitive theorist.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
What followed was a huge search and rescue mission, which cost Suffolk Police more than £2m, captivated the country and fuelled conspiracy theorists.
From BBC ● Sep. 24, 2026
The use of Q phrases by government agencies during wartime has excited online conspiracy theorists.
From Salon ● Aug. 28, 2026
Although the breadth of Ms. Rubel’s reading is impressive, readers might rather hear what the author has to say than a range of academic theorists.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 27, 2026
The result gives nuclear theorists a new experimental benchmark and provides a strategy for investigating the phenomenon in additional nuclei.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 31, 2026
In this they are quite unlike testimonies, which degrade as they pass from ear to ear in an endless game of Chinese whispers; eighteenth-century probability theorists actually devised formulae for calculating this rate of degradation.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
