1A person who gives information to another.

1. 1.1
   another term for informer

   Example sentencesExamples

   • Indeed, the movement of such people can easily be monitored by informants and police officers out of uniform.
   • Crimes are solved by culling the group of people ‘known’ to commit offences of a certain type, or by cultivation of informants.
   • Thompson's court-appointed lawyer didn't try to impeach the informants, so the jury never knew there was reason to doubt them.
   • Treating terrorism like organised crime, investigators used informants, turncoat terrorists, telephone bugs and confessions to build the case.
   • They accused him of too heavily relying on facts learned from informants who had helped build the government's criminal case against the defendants.
   • Senior figures who may have had access to the intelligence material flowing to the special branch from informants have been asked if there is any information that could shed light on the episode.
   • Undercover officers, secret agents, and informants were used to purchase drugs.
   • Illinois is pondering legislation that would require pretrial reliability hearings before prosecutors could use jailhouse informants as witnesses.
   • FBI agents and confidential informants infiltrated antiwar organizations at every level to gather the names of those who opposed the nation's policy.
   • It may also be necessary to protect the lives of informants or intelligence operatives.
   • Fulton was linked to the killing through police informants, not through forensics.
   • Meanwhile, in the online world, sites have rarely cast users as either informants or private attorneys general able to punish breaches of website contracts and rules.
   • However, as the lengthy quotation from his work above suggests, he was regularly able to secure from his informants details of others whom it would be useful for him to consult.
   • It has been claimed that information supplied by an informant to the Special Branch in Dublin, which if acted upon might have thwarted the terrorists, was never passed to the RUC.
   • The documents contained sensitive information on informants, north west criminal gangs and even bank accounts detailing payments for information.
   • Rote offerings of lower sentences won't yield the same payoff - in either cooperation rates or crime reduction - that developing a rapport with informants will.
   • ‘I'm sorry, they're never going to be angels,’ he said about informants.
   • Most prison informants are of bad character and willing to lie in their own interests.
   • But that and any impact which that might have on the operation of the system, including the disclosure of the identity of its inmates or the effectiveness of informants is not a matter for me.
   • Some indication will be sought from the police as to when the informant is likely to come under the jurisdiction of the Prison Service.'
   • But no such objective has been put forward in this case, nor are some of the more obvious ones, such as national security or the protection of informants, relevant.
2. 1.2 A person from whom a linguist or anthropologist obtains information about language, dialect, or culture.
   （为语言学家或人类学家提供语言、方言或文化资料的）原始材料提供者
   Example sentencesExamples

   • The negative attitude towards chatting is generally characteristic of older informants while teen informants were generally more open to chatting.
   • The informants for this research were obtained from Girl Scout councils in the Southeast who worked full-time as outdoor program directors/camp directors.
   • Two scores were obtained from each informant's version of the scale: the Number of Conflicts and the Mean Anger Intensity.
   • The ethnographer becomes more than participant-observer, the informants more than informants, resulting in a hybrid text that is more than/other than ethnography.
   • To help ensure that I accomplished the latter goal, I discussed and modified the framework based on conversations with key informants.
   • In fact, the promise of sexual access to outgroup women has often been identified by anthropologists, ethnographers, and native informants as a primary instigator of conflict in prestate societies.
   • I have also twice had the experience of suddenly recognizing the description of another anthropologist's informant as a mutual friend.
   • By using the CBCL, TRF, and YSR, observations on the problem behaviors of a specific child can be obtained from different informants.
   • He and his informants converse largely in Swahili, and their cosmological references reach even beyond the boundaries of Tanzania and Mozambique.
   • It seems very likely that different responses would have been obtained from the same informants, with variation in the context of questioning.
   • The sampling of informants in ethnographic research is often a combination of convenience sampling and snowball sampling.
   • Before Malinowski, anthropologists relied either on secondary sources or on paid informants for their data.
   • The former involve a description of linguistic structures, usually based on utterances elicited from native-speaking informants.
   • If Moses' claims are true, the next question that comes to mind is: Are there other Native informants out there?
   • My informants, many of whom I have known for more than a decade, digressed through contradictory narrations.
   • The researchers interviewed family members or other knowledgeable informants, using a sample representing 1.97 million deaths from chronic illness in the United States in 2000.
   • The anthropologist Hurston invites informants to play an active role in developing the text.
   • Birame plays the part of a native informant who can ‘translate’ the local culture for her.
   • Interviewers who could speak and read the informants ' language obtained household, socioeconomic, and personal information and information on health and use of health services.
   • Studying Judaism is like visiting a far-off society whose native informants are the Rabbis, and whose testimony about what Jews think and do is available in the books those rabbis wrote.