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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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:
"We want to be a place where there's a mixing of lots of perspectives, and this is us practicing what we preach -- a cosmologist working closely with a condensed matter theorist."
From Science Daily ● Jun. 19, 2026
A U.S. naval officer, historian, and military theorist, Mahan argued that control of the seas was the key to empires from Rome to Britain.
From Barron's ● Jun. 5, 2026
And he took an interest in Jones, the conspiracy theorist and radio and internet host.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 21, 2026
In the 1980s, Pakistan welcomed the Palestinian theorist of jihad Abdullah Azzam.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 22, 2026
To McCorkle, Sergeant Bloom had sounded a bit off-the-wall, a maverick theorist selling out the program.
From "Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing" by Ted Conover
I'm sorry to disappoint any conspiracy theorists, but I can promise you there aren't any clandestine meetings between Fifa's executive committee and the referees.
From BBC ● Jul. 19, 2026
This outperformance, incidentally, is a bit awkward for all those theorists claiming that the so-called “size factor” — meaning the outperformance of smaller companies’ stocks — is dead.
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 14, 2026
Still, frustration has spread well beyond the movement’s conspiracy theorists.
From Salon ● Jul. 8, 2026
The researchers argue that today's leading model of brain function shares striking similarities with ideas that originated with Sigmund Freud and have been developed by psychoanalytic theorists for more than a century.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 1, 2026
Along with the Post-Impressionists and, more recently, Op artists, color theorists have tried to set down their understanding of colors as perceptual and artistic laws equivalent to those of optical physics.
From "History of Art, Volume 1" by H.W. Janson
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.
