Oxford Reference

The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern

Science
J. L. Heilbron

Publisher: Oxford University Press Print Publication Date: 2003

Print ISBN-13: 9780195112290 Published online: 2003
eISBN: 9780199891153

scientist.

The term “scientist” was coined by the Cambridge don and polymath William Whewell to designate a person
interested in promoting natural knowledge. He introduced the term in a review of Mary Somerville's On the
Connexion of the Physical Sciences in 1834. Many other technical terms still in use come from him: “electrode,”
“anode,” “cathode,” and “ion,” in response to Michael Faraday's needs for words to describe his electrolytic
experiments; “Pleistocene,” “Pliocene,” and “Miocene,” to help geologists keep track of epochs; and several more.
In marked contrast to current practice (See TERMINOLOGY IN SCIENCE), he grafted his neologisms on ancient stock.
This, however, did not preserve him from posthumous condemnation by the great lexicographer Henry Watson
Fowler for perpetuating “regrettable barbarisms.”

Whewell concocted “scientist” for the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA), founded in 1832,
so that the participants in its annual meetings and eatings (the banquets being the true “spread of science”
according to Charles Dickens) would have a common label. The BA floated “philosopher,” but rejected it as too
wide and lofty; “savant” (too pretentious and French); and “nature-peeper” or “nature-poker,” after the
Gesellschaft der deutschen Naturforscher und Ärzte, one of the antecedents of the BA (too ridiculous). “Scientist”
also met with disapproval. Like “physicist,” which Whewell invented at the same time and which Faraday
dismissed as unpronounceable, it did not appeal to its beneficiaries. “Un-English, unpleasing, and meaningless,”
sniffed William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, of “physicist”; as for “scientist,” Thomas Henry Huxley declared it “about as
pleasing a word as ‘Electrocution.’”

British “men of science” or “scientific men” (the terms they preferred) resisted “scientist” primarily because of its
association with practice. It resonated with “dentist,” a paid professional in a nasty business, connotations they
wanted to avoid. Its miscegenation of Latin and Greek further indicated its low breeding as did its supposed origin
in the United States. Not until well into the twentieth century did “scientist” oust “man of science” as the preferred
term for professionalized, Americanized, classically uneducated nature pokers.

“Scientist” won out because, despite the wide differences among the sciences, their practitioners came to feel a
need to band together to obtain social recognition and financial support. Scientists in non-English–speaking
countries felt the same need. The French made a substantive of the old adjective “scientifique” to distinguish
practitioners of natural science from savants in general. The first noted occurrence of this usage, which would
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become standard French for “scientist,” dates from 1884. The Germans responded with “Naturwissenschaftler.”
Further indications of the success of Whewell's coinage may be seen in the eagerness of cultivators of non-
natural knowledge to claim it. Today there are political scientists expert in the art of politics, economic scientists
eligible for NOBEL PRIZES, and Christian Scientists opposed to medicine. French “scientiste” and Italian “scientisto”
signify both a practitioner of Christian Science and an exponent of scientism, a doubter and an overly enthusiastic
admirer of modern science.

Bibliography
Charles Dickens, The Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything, in Sketches by Boz (1836).
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Sydney Ross, Scientist: The Story of a Word, Annals of Science 18 (1962): 65–85.
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Jack Morrel and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science (1981).
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J. L. HEILBRON

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