accountant
Pluralaccountants
Pluralaccountants
- 1A professional who organizes, maintains, and audits another party's records, which are usually but not always financial.
The firm's accountant audits each department's records at the end of every quarter.
Many small businesses rely on an accountant to maintain their financial statements.
Similarbookkeeper
Note
The professional sense, defined by work on someone else's records and by auditing them, not only keeping them. In The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy" (1994), having an accountant is itself a sign of arrival: leaving the money to one stands for money too large to manage yourself. In everyday speech it usually comes with a possessive: my accountant, the firm's accountant.
- 2Someone who handles calculations and manages another person's financial affairs.
He served as the estate's accountant, balancing every expense against its income.
A trusted accountant managed the singer's earnings while she toured.
Similarbookkeeper
- 3A person skilled in keeping or adjusting accounts; especially an officer in a public office who has charge of its accounts.
The treasury appointed a new accountant to oversee its official accounts.
As the office's accountant, she reconciled discrepancies across all the public ledgers.
Similarbookkeeper, comptroller
Note
An office as well as a skill: in public administration the accountant was the named officer who had charge of a department's books. Keeping accounts means recording them. Adjusting them means correcting and reconciling entries until they agree. The weight falls on the post itself, while the professional serving clients describes someone working on another party's records.
- 4A person who must give an account of their actions; one who is answerable.
Before the council, the governor was the sole accountant for the funds entrusted to him.
Every guardian remains the accountant for the welfare of those in their care.
Note
Built exactly as it looks: account plus the agent ending -ant, by way of Middle French acuntant, and in English from the mid 15th century. Here the accountant is the one who must answer, not the one who adds up, closer to a steward or trustee than a bookkeeper. Modern readers will hear the profession, so answerable or accountable is safer in new writing.
- 5A discreet term for a sex worker, especially one who prefers not to be publicly identified with the trade.
On every official form she listed herself as an accountant, keeping her real trade out of view.
Among her regular clients she was known simply as an accountant.
Note
A cover story built into a job title: the word borrows the respectability of a dull, trusted profession to name a sex worker who prefers not to be identified. Because the euphemism works only by sounding like the ordinary job, context and tone are all that signal it. Avoid it where readers might take it literally, or where it would read as a sneer.
Less common meaning
- 6Accountable to a person or authority; obliged to answer to them for one's actions or duties.
Note
An adjective that has dropped out of use, sharing its form and origin with the answerable noun. It took to before the person or authority one answered to, as in accountant to the king, much as accountable to works now. A modern reader would hear the job title in that phrase, so accountable is the word to use today.
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Origin
It came from Middle English, from Middle French "acuntant," and is equivalent to "account" plus the suffix "-ant." It was first recorded in the mid-15th century.