Origin of the word psephology

Nate Silver, psephologist.

Right here:

Psephology is the study of how people vote in elections.

A person who studies how people vote in elections is called a Psephologist. Both words are nouns. The "p" in the first syllable is silent when you pronounce the words.

In a sentence, the word would appear thus: Psephology is a specialised science.

To learn its spelling, divide the word into its syllables: pse.phol.o.gy.

The word takes its origin in the Greek word psephos (note: written ψῆφος) meaning "pebble, vote", from the Greek practice of using pebbles to vote.

The question of course is whether these words are actually English given that only a very small fraction of the English-speaking population understands what they mean. The word "election science" or "electionology" alone should be sufficient. If you take a look at the Wikipedia page on psephology (which is remarkably small by the way) you can see that it's available in three other language versions: Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. Let's take a look at them.

pt: Psefologia <-- that's the same
ru: Псефология <-- also the same, just written in a different alphabet
tr: Seçimbilim <-- ah, this one makes sense to anyone that knows the language. Seçim is election and -bilim denotes an -ology or a branch of knowledge. Gökbilim for example (sky-knowledge) is astronomy. Turkish wins.

Of course, bring back the study of Latin and Greek (or at least their root words) in schools and the problem wouldn't be so great. One problem with English and a lot of other European languages is that they have thousands of terms that were brought in when a knowledge of Latin and Greek was necessary for the educated, but then all of a sudden nobody knows those two languages anymore and we're stuck with these thousands of terms that nobody understands at first sight.

Two new Greek words for me from reading Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus: homoeoteleuton (when you skip a line in text because the endings are the same in both and one is mistaken for the other) and that other one about skipping over a piece of text...periblepsis, I think.