informant

Noun

informant (plural informants)

1. One who relays confidential information to someone, especially to the police; an informer.
   • One of her chief informants is Alicent’s handmaiden Talya (Alexis Rabin), whose inside info runs so deep that she’s the first to catch wind of Viserys’ death.2022 October 16, Jenna Scherer, “An enticing House Of The Dragon crowns Westeros' new ruler”, in AV Club
   • Shortly after Amy went missing, an informant told investigators that a member of the Pagans Outlaw Motorcycle Club had bragged about snatching a girl matching Amy’s description in Coconut Grove.2026 July 29, Nicholas Muhoro, “Amy Billig Vanished While Hitchhiking Through Coconut Grove. Then the Calls Began”, in Skip Boring, archived from the original on 31 Jul 2026
2. (proscribed) A native speaker who acts as a linguistic reference for a language being studied. The informant demonstrates native pronunciation, provides grammaticality judgments regarding linguistic well-formedness, and may also explain cultural references and other important contextual information.
   • The only material the linguist has to begin with are the informant's grammatical utterances in the target language pronounced arbitrarily in a natural or assigned communicative situation or stimulated artificially by the investigator.1977, A. E. Kibrik, The methodology of field investigations in linguistics
   • The informant learns his language by formal training and, more importantly, by constant exposure to its use. He cannot repeat to the linguist what he has never seen or heard.2003, Sergei Nirenburg, H. L. Somers, Yorick Wilks, Readings in machine translation, page 116

   Synonyms:

   consultant