Whither scientist?

Although the invention of the term scientist is usually credited to William Whewell and his 1840 book Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, the real credit belongs to ‘some ingenious gentleman’ present at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in Cambridge. As Whewell himself writes, in reporting the meeting and the discussion of what those who practiced science should be called:

“Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity of philologer and metaphysician; savans was rather assuming, besides being French instead of English; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist – but this was not generally palatable.”

Quoted in Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture, p.7

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