Investigator

How to spell investigator

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce investigator

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does investigator mean?

1. nounA person who carries out a formal inquiry to establish facts, often into a crime, accident, or wrongdoing.

Investigator in a sentence

• The lead investigator interviewed every witness before filing the report.

• The insurance company sent an investigator to assess the fire damage claim.

Where does investigator come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin verb investigare, meaning 'to track down' or 'to search into', which was built from the prefix in- ('into') and vestigium, the ordinary Latin word for a 'footprint' or 'trace'. The original image is wonderfully concrete: an investigator was someone following footprints, picking up a trail the way a hunter or tracker would. The same vestigium also survives in English as 'vestige', meaning a faint trace of something that has otherwise vanished. Latin formed the agent noun investigator directly from the verb, and English adopted it during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the study of evidence and inquiry grew more formal. The spelling keeps the buried 'vestig' core intact, which is the part worth remembering, since the unstressed middle vowels (the second 'i' and the 'a') are where adults most often slip.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• vestig (track, trace, from vestigium 'footprint')
• -ate (verb-forming)
• -or (agent noun: one who does)