How to spell geologist

hear it/dʒi'ɑlʌdʒʌst/nounSchwa and roots

What it means: A scientist who studies the Earth.

In a sentence: The geologist studied the colorful rocks.

The part people get wrong

Watch for an unstressed vowel that is hard to hear. Often misspelled as geoligist or geologistt.

Same family: geologic, geological, geologically, geology, geochemistry. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: “Geologist” comes from the Greek roots geo- meaning “earth” and -logist from logos meaning “study” or “reason,” so a geologist is literally a person who studies the earth. The word became common in English in the 18th–19th centuries as scientists began to systematically study rocks, fossils, and the history of our planet.

Patterns it uses: The unstressed vowel (schwa)

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