# analyst

Pronunciation: say "AN-uh-list" /ˈænəlɪst/

## Noun

1. Someone who analyzes; a person who examines information or situations in detail in order to understand them.
   - Simple: A person who studies something carefully to understand its parts and how it works.
   - _As an analyst for the league, he breaks down game footage every week._
   - _Intelligence analysts pieced together the picture from hundreds of intercepted messages._
2. A professional who examines financial data, markets, or business operations and produces forecasts, valuations, or recommendations.
   - Simple: A person whose job is to study companies, markets, or money and give advice about them.
   - _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._
3. A practitioner of psychoanalysis; a therapist who treats patients by bringing unconscious thoughts, memories, and conflicts into awareness through extended talk.
   - Simple: A kind of therapist who helps people explore hidden thoughts and feelings by talking about them.
   - _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._
4. A specialist who studies an organization's computer systems and procedures and designs information-system solutions to business problems.
   - Simple: A person whose job is to study a company's computer systems and make them work better.
   - _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._
5. Someone with an analytical turn of mind; a person who naturally approaches questions by breaking them into parts and reasoning through them.
   - Simple: A person who likes to think things through step by step instead of guessing.
   - _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._
6. A mathematician who works in real analysis, the rigorous study of real numbers, limits, sequences, and continuous functions.
   - Simple: A mathematician who works in a part of math that studies limits and smooth change.
   - _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._

## Origin

The word comes from French "analyste."

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/analyst (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).