informant

American  

[in-fawr-muhnt] / ɪnˈfɔr mənt /

noun

• informants
  plural

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

---

Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• informants
  plural

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

See Examples For:

informant informants

An informant would tell them the attack was rooted in a chain-snatching at the Lakewood Mall two months earlier.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 12, 2026

He traveled in a van with Abdel-Rahman and Emad Salem, the government informant who later became a key witness in the federal case against Abdel-Rahman.

From Slate ● Jul. 14, 2026

The defence case of Olatimbo Ayinde, the oil industry executive who was also found not guilty by the jury, was she had been working as an informant for the Nigerian authorities to expose corruption.

From BBC ● Jun. 17, 2026

Between 2015 and 2023, the nonprofit paid this informant $270,000.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 29, 2026

The bartender, a Russian informant, missed that second part.

From "Fallout: Spies, Superbombs, and the Ultimate Cold War Showdown" by Steve Sheinkin

A former director at the Southern Poverty Law Center was arrested for allegedly overseeing secret payments to informants from white supremacist groups, federal authorities said Wednesday.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 12, 2026

Security expert Abdullahi Abdullahi said he believed armed groups are not just getting help from security forces, but from civilian informants.

From BBC ● Jul. 27, 2026

The Interior Ministry, with an estimated 140,000 state security officials and 500,000 informants, monitors and infiltrates dissident movements.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 5, 2026

In that ruling, the top court had said that Muslim men who were placed on the government's no-fly list because they refused to serve as FBI informants could seek to hold federal agents financially liable.

From BBC ● Jun. 23, 2026

Based on leads from informants and from circumstantial evidence, the private detectives began to develop a crystalline theory of the crime.

From "Killers of the Flower Moon" by David Grann