informant
See also: Informant
English
Etymology
inform + -ant
Pronunciation
- (UK) IPA(key): /ɪnˈfɔːmənt/
- (US) IPA(key): /ɪnˈfɔɹmənt/
Audio (UK) (file)
Noun
informant (plural informants)
- 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:
- 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.
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- (linguistics) 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.
- 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.
- 1977, A. E. Kibrik, The methodology of field investigations in linguistics
Synonyms
- See Thesaurus:informant
Translations
one who relays confidential information
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lingustics: native speaker who acts as a reference
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See also
- name names
Catalan
Verb
informant
- present participle of informar
Dutch
Etymology
Borrowed, more probably from French or German than from English due to the word's ultimate stress.
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ˌɪn.fɔrˈmɑnt/
Audio (file) - Hyphenation: in‧for‧mant
- Rhymes: -ɑnt
Noun
informant m (plural informanten, diminutive informantje n)
- informer, informant
French
Participle
informant
- present participle of informer
Further reading
- “informant”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.
Latin
Verb
īnfōrmant
- third-person plural present active indicative of īnfōrmō