Aerodynamist

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A scientist or engineer who studies how air moves around objects and designs shapes that move efficiently through the atmosphere
2. An expert in the branch of physics concerned with the motion of air and the forces it exerts on bodies such as aircraft and cars
3. A person who specializes in aerodynamics, analyzing airflow and drag to improve the performance of vehicles and flying machines

Etymology: Aerodynamist is a plain formation rather than a story with a famous coiner. It is built from "aerodynamic," itself a compound of the Greek "aēr" (air) and "dynamikos" (powerful, relating to force), with the suffix "-ist" added to name a person who practises or specialises in the field. "Aerodynamic" was in use in English by the early 1800s in technical contexts, and "aerodynamics" followed as the name for the study of air in motion and its forces on bodies moving through it. The compound tracks a shift in how people thought about flight. Greek "dynamis" originally meant ability or strength, and it passed into English through scientific Latin and French as a term for forces in motion. The branch of physics it names became a serious discipline only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as engineers worked out why wings lift and how bodies behave at speed, which is when "aerodynamicist" and "aerodynamist" came into use for the specialists doing that work.

Synonyms: aerodynamicist