informant

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See also: Informant

English

English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

Etymology

inform +‎ -ant

Pronunciation

  • (UK) IPA(key): /ɪnˈfɔːmənt/
  • (US) IPA(key): /ɪnˈfɔɹmənt/
  • Audio (UK)(file)

Noun

informant (plural informants)

  1. 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.
  2. (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.

Synonyms

Derived terms

Translations

See also

Catalan

Verb

informant

  1. gerund 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)

  1. informer, informant

French

Participle

informant

  1. present participle of informer

Further reading

Latin

Verb

īnfōrmant

  1. third-person plural present active indicative of īnfōrmō
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