Informatics

In my Guide to English Language Usage  I say

information technology (IT): The word informatics appears in dictionaries but is not in common current use.

True the COED defines it as

the science of processing data for storage and retrieval

but I have always thought of it as falling into the category of what I call

dictionary words: Some words are found in dictionaries but are hardly ever used outside them. The synonyms architectural and western are almost always used instead of architectonic and occidental.

other examples being petroleum (excepting technical use and OPEC) and milliard.

Nevertheless, in a letter in today’s Guardian I read:

… expertise in [algorithms] is to be found predominantly in departments of computer science and informatics

I wonder what the status of this word is. It may have a precise technical meaning but I am sure that it is not used generally, as informática is in Spanish for example

Comments

[Account Deleted]

It may be a word "whose time has come": I note that a number of British universities now have schools of informatics and list it as a subject.

The word is likely to become more common, I think.

[Ronnie]

It seems an odd word to me, not coming from a Greek root with an -ika suffix, like say gymnastics or hermeneutics, but rather presumably from the French informatique. I can see that it is more impressive intellectually and academically than Information Technology, suggestive of wires and Mullard valves.

[Peter Harvey]

According to the OED it comes into English from Russian!

tr. Russ. informátika (A. I. Mikhailov et al. 1966, in Nauchno-tekhnicheskaya Informatsiya XII. 35), f.

In Spanish informática is an everyday word, and an informático is the person who fixes your computer when it goes wrong.