private investigator

Questions about private investigator

What does private investigator mean?

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

What is another word for private investigator?

Close synonyms include private detective, PI, private eye, 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 investigator a common word?

private investigator 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.