private detective

Questions about private detective

What does private detective mean?

private detective means "someone who can be employed as a detective to collect information".

What is another word for private detective?

Close synonyms include PI, private eye, private investigator, operative, shamus. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is private detective a common word?

private detective is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.