informant

American  

[in-fawr-muhnt] / ɪnˈfɔr mənt /

noun

1. a person who informs or gives information; informer.

   Synonyms:

   tipster, adviser, source

2. a person who supplies social or cultural data in answer to the questions of an investigator.

3. Linguistics. a native speaker of a language who supplies utterances and forms for one analyzing or learning the language.

---

informant British  

/ ɪnˈfɔːmənt /

noun

1. a person who gives information about a thing, a subject being studied, etc

---

Etymology

Origin of informant

1655–65; < Latin infōrmant- (stem of infōrmāns ) present participle of infōrmāre. See inform ¹, -ant

Explanation

An informant is someone who secretly provides information to police, the FBI, or another law enforcement agency. If you watch a lot of crime shows on TV, you're probably familiar with informants. In the world of law enforcement, informants are officially called CIs, for "confidential informant" or "criminal informant." The information informants provide can be useful in catching criminals, and the informant usually gets something in return — money or a reduced prison sentence, for example. Sometimes informant simply means "person who gives information."

Example Sentences

Aleksandar Matanovic, a Serbian grandmaster who co-founded Chess Informant, a publishing company that revolutionized how players learned and studied the game, died on Aug. 9 in Belgrade.

From New York Times • Aug. 17, 2023

To this day, opening up an Informant from the mid-1970s can revive an entire era and lead to several hours of blissful time-wasting.

From Washington Times • Aug. 15, 2023

Entry 819 in the Register of Deaths in Aberdeenshire lists Princess Anne, the Princess Royal as the Informant.

From Washington Post • Sep. 29, 2022

The second favorite is Paid Informant at 7-5 for Richard Baltas and Flavien Prat.

From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 19, 2019

In case documents, she would be called “Confidential Informant T4.”

From "The Woman All Spies Fear" by Amy Butler Greenfield