messenger

American  

[mes-uhn-jer] / ˈmɛs ən dʒər /

noun

• messengers
  plural

1. a person who carries a message or goes on an errand for another, especially as a matter of duty or business.

   Synonyms:

   courier, bearer

2. a person employed to convey official dispatches or to go on other official or special errands.

   a bank messenger.

3. Nautical.

   1. a rope or chain made into an endless belt to pull on an anchor cable or to drive machinery from some power source, as a capstan or winch.

   2. a light line by which a heavier line, as a hawser, can be pulled across a gap between a ship and a pier, a buoy, another ship, etc.

4. Oceanography. a brass weight sent down a line to actuate a Nansen bottle or other oceanographic instrument.

5. Archaic. a herald, forerunner, or harbinger.

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verb (used with object)

1. to send by messenger.

messenger British  

/ ˈmɛsɪndʒə /

noun

1. a person who takes messages from one person or group to another or others

2. a person who runs errands or is employed to run errands

3. a carrier of official dispatches; courier

4. nautical

   1. a light line used to haul in a heavy rope

   2. an endless belt of chain, rope, or cable, used on a powered winch to take off power

5. archaic a herald

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• messengers
  plural

Etymology

Origin of messenger

1175–1225; Middle English messager, messangere < Anglo-French; Old French messagier. See message, -er ²

Explanation

Use the noun messenger to refer to someone who brings you a message. Your mail carrier delivering a postcard and your gossipy friend calling to give you the latest news can each be described as a messenger. Delivering messages for others is certainly a time-honored profession, since even the gods of Antiquity needed someone to do it — the Greeks had Hermes and the Romans had Mercury as their messenger gods. A messenger carries a message, and that's where the word itself comes from: the Latin root of message is missus, which means "a sending away, sending, dispatching" and is the past participle of mittere, "send."

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

messenger messengers

Because working-class voters, as they tell us themselves, are not simply waiting to be activated by the right program, messenger or phrase.

From Salon ● Aug. 9, 2026

“I’m not a messenger for anybody in the world. I’m a messenger for my community.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 3, 2026

Serotonin is a chemical messenger with jobs throughout the body.

From Science Daily ● Jul. 12, 2026

Herman was a combative messenger for Bass, issuing broadsides against her rivals as she fought for a second four-year term.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 24, 2026

Then Zeus sent another messenger to her, a great personage, none other than his revered mother Rhea, the oldest of the gods.

From "Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes" by Edith Hamilton

This called for the creation of fake messengers, and Delmer invented some absolute stunners.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 12, 2026

His lab identified it years ago as one of the thousands of peptides that act as chemical messengers in the human body, one he believed might someday have therapeutic uses for humans.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 6, 2026

He's despatched messengers on horseback to free Harold who has been taken captive in France.

From BBC ● Jul. 17, 2026

Company dancer Lloyd Knight, costumed as the Preacher in “Spring” and captured in a determined stance on a boulder, faces the book’s last page, which quotes Graham: “Dancers are the messengers of the gods.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 9, 2026

At the terminal on the far end, signals are converted back into chemical messengers, called neurotransmitters, for the short voyage across the synapse to the dendrites of the next neuron.

From "Phineas Gage" by John Fleischman

Related Words

• courier
• emissary
• go-between
• mediator
• prophet