informant

From inform + -ant.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ɪnˈfɔːmənt/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ɪnˈfɔɹmənt/

• Audio (UK):

  (file)

informant (plural informants)

2. One who relays confidential information to someone, especially to the police; an informer.
   • 2022 October 16, Jenna Scherer, “An enticing House Of The Dragon crowns Westeros' new ruler”, in AV Club‎^[1]:

     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.

   • 2026 July 29, Nicholas Muhoro, “Amy Billig Vanished While Hitchhiking Through Coconut Grove. Then the Calls Began”, in Skip Boring‎^[2], archived from the original on 31 July 2026:

     Shortly after Amy went missing, an informant told investigators that a member of the Pagans Outlaw Motorcycle Club had bragged about snatching a girl matching Amy’s description in Coconut Grove.

4. (linguistics, proscribed in the US and Canada) 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.

   Synonym: consultant (preferred term in North America)

   • 1977, A. E. Kibrik, The methodology of field investigations in linguistics:

     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.

   • 2003, Sergei Nirenburg, H. L. Somers, Yorick Wilks, Readings in machine translation, page 116:

     The informant learns his language by formal training and, more importantly, by constant exposure to its use. He cannot repeat to the linguist what he has never seen or heard.

• See Thesaurus:informant

• name names

informant

1. gerund of informar

Borrowed, more probably from French or German than from English due to the word's ultimate stress.

• IPA^(key): /ˌɪn.fɔrˈmɑnt/

• Audio:

  (file)

• Hyphenation: in‧for‧mant
• Rhymes: -ɑnt

informant m (plural informanten, diminutive informantje n)

1. informer, informant

informant

1. present participle of informer

• “informant”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012

īnfōrmant

1. third-person plural present active indicative of īnfōrmō