informant

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

People who reveal secrets & tell tales
big mouth
blabbermouth
dobber
fink
grass
nark
rat
rumour-monger
scandalmonger
scaremonger
sneak
snitch
source
stool pigeon
supergrass
tattletale
telltale
whistle-blower

informer | American Dictionary

informer
noun[ C ]
us/ɪnˈfɔr·mər/
a person who tells esp. the police about someone’s criminal activities

Examples of informer

informer
The professional informer was a dubious and thoroughly unreliable dealer in information.
What is not clear from the record, however, is how this unwanted publicity was dealt with by law-enforcement agencies, police handlers, or the informers themselves.
I have proof enough to assure myself of the atrocities which this gang of spies and informers have committed.
Anonymously authored pamphlets were hardly the most serious obstacles that the state's informers and their police partners in licensed crime had to overcome.
The language barrier represented another pressure, since the traveller could be the victim of interpreters or informers.
The second was active surveillance, prevention of crime and an accurate network of informers.
When excise sales were far too low, they intensified their enforcement efforts through police patrols, informers and other tried and true methods.
Many of the new members also acted as informers for the security organs.
Meanwhile, a network of police informers was established, who were paid 'according to the value of their information'.
In order to maintain credibility, informers had to pass information to agencies of sufficient quality to ensure successful conversion into prosecutions.
Such information in high-context societies can, paradoxically, raise the suspicion that the informer is withholding information or even concealing the truth.
There is no crime in detecting and destroying in war-time, the spy and the informer.
They claimed that these paragraphs opened the way for physicians to become informers for the police.
Whatever else government informers achieved, they certainly created an atmosphere of intimidation.
Occasionally, culturally camouflaged informers helped achieve significant results.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.