analyst
Pluralanalysts
- 1Someone who analyzes; a person who examines information or situations in detail in order to understand them.
As an analyst for the league, he breaks down game footage every week.
Intelligence analysts pieced together the picture from hundreds of intercepted messages.
Note
The broad sense, from French analyste, that every specialized use narrows. It names anyone who takes something apart to understand it, from game footage to intercepted messages. In everyday talk the bare noun is often heard as one of the professions, such as the financial or business analyst or the computing specialist. When it matters, add the field: a data analyst, an intelligence analyst.
- 2A professional who examines financial data, markets, or business operations and produces forecasts, valuations, or recommendations.
Wall Street analysts cut their forecasts for the retailer after a weak holiday season.
The analyst built a model projecting the startup's revenue over the next five years.
- 3A practitioner of psychoanalysis; a therapist who treats patients by bringing unconscious thoughts, memories, and conflicts into awareness through extended talk.
Her analyst rarely spoke during sessions, letting the long silences do their work.
Analysts in the classical tradition spend years on the couch themselves before treating patients.
Similarpsychoanalyst, therapist
Note
Psychiatry's clipped form of psychoanalyst, and it usually comes with a possessive: my analyst, her analyst. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) catches the idiom: "a difficult session with my analyst last evening." Strictly, it names someone trained in psychoanalysis, the method of free association, dreams and transference. For a therapist of another school, therapist or counselor is the safer word.
- 4A specialist who studies an organization's computer systems and procedures and designs information-system solutions to business problems.
The analyst spent a month documenting the hospital's records workflow before proposing a new database design.
Our analysts translate what the sales team needs into requirements the developers can build.
Note
Inside computing, the bare noun is shorthand for systems analyst, the bridge between business stakeholders and software developers: requirements go in one side, and system specifications come out the other. Outside a technology setting the clipped form is ambiguous. Spell out systems analyst when readers might hear the business or financial analyst instead.
- 5Someone with an analytical turn of mind; a person who naturally approaches questions by breaking them into parts and reasoning through them.
He's an analyst by temperament, never satisfied with a hunch when the data might say more.
Marta is the analyst in the partnership, balancing her cofounder's instincts with careful research.
Similarthinker
- 6A mathematician who works in real analysis, the rigorous study of real numbers, limits, sequences, and continuous functions.
As an analyst, she spends her days proving convergence theorems rather than counting discrete structures.
The math department hired two analysts and a topologist this year.
Practice
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Origin
The word comes from French "analyste."