Word.ws English Dictionary

Stigler's law

Stigler's law proper noun: the cynical observation that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.

Proper noun

Stigler's law

  1. The cynical observation that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.
    • Thus Hempel's paradox, later indeed popularized by Hempel, is a nice example of Stigler's law: nothing is named after its inventor. It^([sic]) worth noting that according to Stigler's testimony, Stigler's law is also an example of Stigler's law, being invented by the sociologist Robert K. Merton...2020, Ferenc Csatári, Measurement and Meaning, Lexington Books, →ISBN, page 83

Origin of Stigler's law

Proposed in 1980 by statistics professor Stephen Stigler (born 1941).

Questions about Stigler's law

What does Stigler's law mean?
Stigler's law means the cynical observation that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.
What part of speech is Stigler's law?
Stigler's law is a proper noun.

Words near Stigler's law in the dictionary

  1. Stigger
  2. Stiggers
  3. stight
  4. Stigian
  5. Stigler
  6. Stigler's law
  7. Stiglitz
  8. stigma
  9. stigmal
  10. stigmaless
  11. stigmaria

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Stigler's law (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “Stigler's law.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stigler%27s_law. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.