Informant

How to spell informant

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce informant

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does informant mean?

1. nounA person who supplies information, especially someone who secretly gives details to the police or authorities.
2. nounA person who provides data or local knowledge to a researcher, such as in linguistics or anthropology.

Informant in a sentence

• The detective met a confidential informant in the car park after midnight.

• The linguist recorded each informant describing how the dialect was spoken at home.

• The newspaper protected the identity of its informant inside the company.

• The anthropologist relied on one elderly informant for details of the village rituals.

Where does informant come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb informare, which literally meant 'to give form to' or 'to shape', built from the prefix in- ('into') and forma ('a shape or outline'). In late Latin the sense moved from physically shaping something to mentally shaping a person, that is, instructing or teaching them, which is how the idea of giving someone 'information' arose. English took on the verb 'inform' through Old French in the 1300s, and by the seventeenth century the agent noun 'informant' had appeared, naming a person who supplies knowledge or facts. The same forma root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'form', 'format', and 'reform', a useful reminder that the middle of the word is spelled with the ordinary 'form'. The ending is the Latin agent suffix -ant, 'one who does', which explains why the word finishes in -ant rather than the more common -ent.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• form (shape, from Latin forma)
• -ant (agent suffix: one who does)