claimant

UK/ˈkleɪ.mənt/US/ˈkleɪ.mənt/

nounC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — claim sits at #1,272mostly written

Other forms: claimants

A claimant is somebody who says they have a right to something. A rival claimant, the claimant's case, benefit claimants.

In English civil courts it replaced plaintiff in 1999, so the person bringing a case is now the claimant. In welfare it is the official word for somebody receiving a benefit.

Definitions of claimant

1nounclaimantSomebody who says they have a right to something.C1
“The court ruled in favour of the claimant and ordered the company to pay damages.”

claimant is a person.

Where it comes from

Anglo-Norman clamant comes from Latin clamare, to cry out.

Latin
clāmō — to cry out
Anglo-Norman
clamant
English, today
claimant

From Old French - and Anglo-Norman clamant, present participle of the verb clamer and its variants, from Latin clāmō (“to cry out”), equivalent to claim + ant. Compare clamant.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

claimant in the wild

In common law, damages are a remedy in the form of a monetary award to be paid to a claimant as compensation for loss or injury.
Damages
To warrant the award, the claimant must show that a breach of duty has caused foreseeable loss.
Damages
In addition, it may also refer to that of a deposed monarch, a type of claimant referred to as head of a house.
Pretender
Universal Credit was due to replace Jobseeker's Allowance and other benefits for 500,000 new claimants from October 2013, and eventually will replace income-based Jobseeker's Allowance entirely.
Jobseeker's Allowance
To be eligible for JSA, claimants must state that they are actively seeking work by filling in a Jobseeker's Agreement form and attending a New Jobseeker interview (NJI).
Jobseeker's Allowance

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the clāmō family

claim

claimant — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

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