speculator

noun

spec·​u·​la·​tor ˈspe-kyə-ˌlā-tər 

plural speculators

: someone who speculates: such as

a

: a person who thinks or guesses especially in an idle or casual way about something that is unknown or uncertain

I sat Friday night in the dining room in front of my laptop, the TV in the next room flitting among experts and speculators about what happened in Paris …

—Scott Martelle

"… All that we ought to ask, therefore, is, that the witnesses of our conduct, and the speculators on our motives, should be capable of taking the highest view which the circumstances of the case may admit. …"

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

b

: a person who makes a relatively risky investment in something (such as stocks or real estate) in the hope of making a large short-term profit from market fluctuations

futures/currency speculators

By the late 1870s Edward Pray was living in New York City, still interested in mining but instead now as a speculator in mining stocks.

—Willa Kane

Over the years, many houses have been bought by speculators or real estate companies and rented out.

—Margaret Gillerman

Examples of speculator in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

The mass migration of speculators swelled California’s population to more than quadruple in size in about a decade’s time, growing to more than 370,000 people by 1860. —Elise Hammond, CNN Money, 17 May 2025

For speculators, the price of cocoa has been known to fluctuate over $1,000 a day, so the opportunities for traders, following technical or fundamental analysis, can be lucrative. —David T. Nudelman, Forbes, 21 Mar. 2025

For one thing, this is a lot closer to how Wall Street started – a game of telephone among pods of speculators before the invention of the telephone – than is represented in any academic version of sober capital formation. —Michael Santoli, CNBC, 26 July 2025

Bearish sentiment was also evident in the derivatives market where an unidentified speculator paid about $5 million in premium on the Deribit exchange to buy Bitcoin put options expiring on Aug. 8 at the strike price of $110,000, according to prime broker FalconX, which facilitated the trade. —Bloomberg, Mercury News, 25 July 2025

Word History

Etymology

speculate + -or entry 1; in earlier sense "observer, lookout," borrowed from Latin speculātor "scout, spy, sentinel," from speculārī "to keep a close watch on, spy out, watch for" + -tor, agent suffix — more at speculate

First Known Use

1555, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for speculator

• activator
• actuator
• agitator
• alligator
• allocator
• alternator
• animator
• annotator
• applicator
• arbitrator
• aspirator
• aviator