physician
noun
Simple meaning
A medical doctor trained in human medicine.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
fuhzishuhnSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
fəˈzɪʃən
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
A medical doctor trained in human medicine.
A practitioner of physic, i.e. a specialist in internal medicine, especially as opposed to a surgeon; a practitioner who treats with medication rather than with surgery.
A licensed medical practitioner
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B1 · Intermediate
- Frequency
- Common
- Typical Use
- Everyday English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: A medical doctor trained in human medicine.
Used this way, physician is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a clinical use: it belongs to medical description, where it is factual rather than emotive.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Medicine/healthcare
- Science
- Technical/specialist writing
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Nearby words
- md , a specialist term, precise but narrower
- medico , more casual, better suited to speech than writing
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Similar Words, What’s the Difference?
Close in meaning, but not always interchangeable.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Assisted suicide where the assistant is a physician.
The right of a physician to refuse to divulge confidential information from a patient without the consent of the patient.
A physician (especially an intern) who lives in a hospital and cares for hospitalized patients under the supervision of the medical staff of the hospital.
The physician who provides primary care.
A physician (especially an intern) who lives in a hospital and cares for hospitalized patients under the supervision of the medical staff of the hospital.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.