informant
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informant
- /ɪnˈfɔːmənt/ UK
- /ɪnˈfɔɹmənt/ US
Where it comes from
Etymology tree
English inform
Proto-Indo-European *-onts
Latin -ns
Latin -āns
Old French -antbor.
Proto-Indo-European *-onts
Proto-Germanic *-ndz
Proto-West Germanic *-andī
Old English -ende
Middle English -ant
English -ant
English informant
From inform + -ant.
noun informants
- One who relays confidential information to someone, especially to the police; an informer. One of her chief informants is Alicent’s handmaiden Talya (Alexis Rabin), whose inside info runs so deep that she’s the first to catch wind of Viserys’ death.
- A native speaker who acts as a linguistic reference for a language being studied. The informant demonstrates native pronunciation, provides grammaticality judgments regarding linguistic well-formedness, and may also explain cultural references and other important contextual information. The only material the linguist has to begin with are the informant's grammatical utterances in the target language pronounced arbitrarily in a natural or assigned communicative situation or stimulated artificially by the investigator.
Similar: abaddon, accuser, beefer, bewrayer, bigmouth, blabber, blabtale, blabtongue, canary, CI, finger, fink
