linguist

noun

lin·​guist ˈliŋ-gwist 

1

: a person accomplished in languages

especially : one who speaks several languages

2

: a person who specializes in linguistics

Examples of linguist in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

In fact, experiments were so underwhelming that a report released in 1966 by the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee, set up by the U.S. government and made up of linguists and machine translation researchers, determined that there wasn’t much hope in the near-term. —Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 23 Jan. 2025

By constructing artificial languages that have these rules, linguists can use neural networks to explore how people learn. —Ben Brubaker, Quanta Magazine, 13 Jan. 2025

Various research by linguists suggests that by the first year of life, the average child knows about 50 words, by the third year their vocabulary rises to 1,000 words, by age 4 approximately 5,000 words, and by the fifth year possibly 10,000 words. —Lance Eliot, Forbes, 29 Dec. 2024

To help work out how Richard and his contemporaries might have sounded, Morley-Chisholm enlisted the help of professor David Crystal, a leading linguist and expert in 15th-century pronunciation. —Freddie Clayton, NBC News, 18 Nov. 2024

Word History

Etymology

probably borrowed from New Latin linguista, from Latin lingua "tongue, speech, language" + -ista -ist entry 1 — more at tongue entry 1

First Known Use

1591, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Kids Definition

linguist

noun

lin·​guist ˈliŋ-gwəst 

1

: a person skilled in languages

2

: a person who specializes in linguistics