Other forms: informed, informs, informing
To inform someone is to tell them a fact they need to know. The airline informs you that the flight is delayed; the doctor informs the family; a small sign informs visitors that the gate closes at six.
Inform is the formal word — in conversation you would say tell. It takes a person as its object and then OF, ABOUT, or a that-clause: inform the police of the theft, inform staff about the changes, inform him that the meeting has moved. Inform ON somebody is a different and unfriendly thing: it means report them to the authorities, and the person who does it is an informer or an informant. There is a quieter sense used about ideas, where nothing is announced at all: the research informs the policy, her years in a kitchen inform everything she writes. And note the adjective — an informed decision is one made with the facts already in hand.
1verbinformTo tell someone a fact, especially one they need or have a right to know.~59%
“Please inform the office if your address changes.”
formal in this meaning — an editor’s judgement
2verbgiveTo give the authorities information about someone's wrongdoing.~2%
“He informed on his own brother to save himself.”
3verbshapeTo shape something from underneath, by being present in it.~39%
“A lifetime of teaching informs the way she runs a meeting.”
formal in this meaning — an editor’s judgement
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin īnfōrmō meant to shape something: in-, "into", plus fōrma, "form, shape". To inform a person was to give their mind a shape it did not have before, which is why the same verb covered training and educating as well as telling. Old French enformer handed it on to Middle English as informen. The old sense survives in the quiet use — research that informs a policy is shaping it, not announcing anything.
Latin
īnfōrmō — to shape, form, train, instruct, educate
Old French
enformer
Middle English
informen
English, today
inform
Built from
From Middle English informen, enformen, borrowed from Old French enformer, informer (“to train, instruct, inform”), from Latin īnfōrmō (“to shape, form, train, instruct, educate”), from in- (“into”) + fōrma (“form, shape”), equivalent to in + form.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA