Other forms: informants
An informant is somebody who quietly passes information on. A police informant, a paid informant, protect the informant.
Handling them is one of the most tightly regulated parts of policing, because the informant is often a criminal and the relationship can corrupt both sides. In linguistics an informant is a native speaker who supplies examples, which is entirely respectable.
1nouninformantSomebody who quietly passes information on.
“The police received a tip from an informant inside the gang.”
informant is a person.
inform-ANT → an ANT
One ant leaves the line, climbs onto a police boot and points back at the nest. The rest of the nest never knows who told.
hooks ontoant
Latin
īnfōrmō — to shape, form, train, instruct, educate
Old French
enformer
Middle English
informen
English
inform
English, today
informant
Built from
From inform + -ant. inform comes 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