agents

Noun

agent (plural agents)

1. One who exerts power, or has the power to act.
   • Seeing we are so wonderfully endowed with priceless gifts by our Heavenly Father, will he not require usury at our hands? He will. But he has made us agents to ourselves, which makes us responsible for the way in which we use the talents he has given us, for the manner we expend the gold and...1862, Brigham Young, “Call for Teams to Go to the Frontiers, etc.”, in Journal of Discourses, volume 9
2. One who acts for, or in the place of, another (the principal), by that person's authority; someone entrusted to act on behalf of or in behalf of another, such as to transact business for them.
   • He worked as an agent for the government.
3. A person who looks for work for another person and brokers a deal between the hiree and hirer.
   • Ronald Koeman has agreed a deal with Everton to become their new manager, his agent has reportedly told Dutch media. The agent Rob Jansen said, according to the popular Voetbal International website, that it was now down to Southampton and Everton to agree a compensation package for the Dutchman...2016 June 4, Press Association, “Ronald Koeman’s agent says Dutchman has agreed terms with Everton”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 22 Jun 2021

   Synonyms:

   manager, representative, rep

4. Someone who works for an intelligence agency: whether an officer or employee thereof or anyone else who agrees to help their efforts (for ideology, for money, as blackmailee, or otherwise).
   • @Gary, are you a PAP agent? ... =) trying to incite rebellion and revolution on this site so that the govt will have an excuse to take down this site?Paragraph 4, Public Prosecutor v Yue Mun Yew Gary [2012] SGHC 188
5. An active power or cause or substance; something (e.g. biological, chemical, thermal, etc.) that has the power to produce an effect.
   • So far seems to be the work of chemistry alone; at least we have no right to conclude that any other agent interferes; since hay, when it happens to imbibe moisture, exhibits nearly the same processes."1807, James Edward Smith, chapter 11, in An introduction to physiological and systematical botany
6. In the client-server model, the part of the system that performs information preparation and exchange on behalf of a client or server. Especially in the phrase “intelligent agent” it implies some kind of autonomous process which can communicate with other agents to perform some collective task on behalf of one or more humans.

See all 11 meanings of agent