minder
noun
Simple meaning
Someone who is assigned to watch over foreign visitors.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
mynderSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈmaɪndɚ
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
Someone (usually in totalitarian countries) who is assigned to watch over foreign visitors
“I turned around and there, a few hundred feet away, was our government minder, Li Wong Su, huffing and puffing toward us.”
One who minds, tends, or watches something such as a child, a machine, or cattle; a keeper.
A monitor assigned by the authorities to someone, such as a foreign visitor (to exercise control over their contacts with the populace) or a journalist or someone who is speaking to journalists (to monitor and control what they say).
british
A personal bodyguard.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- C2 · Proficient (estimated)
- Frequency
- Rare
- Typical Use
- Primarily written
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Someone (usually in totalitarian countries) who is assigned to watch over foreign visitors
Used this way, minder is a common word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
“I turned around and there, a few hundred feet away, was our government minder, Li Wong Su, huffing and puffing toward us.”
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use minder
- “I turned around and there, a few hundred feet away, was our government minder, Li Wong Su, huffing and puffing toward us.”noun
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
That which is responsible for one's thoughts, feelings, and conscious brain functions.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
Not mindful or attentive.
Bearing in mind.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
A person who looks after babies (usually in the person's own home) while the babys' parents are working.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.