speculator

noun

Etymology: From Latin speculātor (“spy, explorer, investigator”), from speculor (“to watch, to observe”) + -tor (“-er: forming agent nouns”), from specula (“watchtower”), from speciō (“to watch, to observe”), q.v. In some senses, an agent noun formed within English from speculate. Doublet of spectator.

1. One who speculates; an observer; a contemplator.

   “a bold and paradoxical speculator”

2. One who forms theories; a theorist.

   “[…] in things of Fact, the People are as much to be believed, as the most subtle Philosophers and Speculators, since here sense is the Judge.”

   “For, in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, a speculator who had dared to affirm that the human soul is by its nature mortal, and does, in the great majority of cases, actually die with the body, would have been burned alive in Smithfield.”

3. One who speculates; as in investing, one who is willing to take volatile risks upon invested principal for the potential of substantial returns.

   “He had inherited his not inconsiderable fortune from an American cousin, who had in his time been a successful speculator—a speculator not exactly in crops, which are notoriously kittle-cattle, but in official crop reports.”

   “But it would be very unjust to think of all the Railway Members as speculators and simply out to feather their own nests, not that it is fair to think of George Hudson in this light alone.”

4. Synonym of field goal.