inspector
Pluralinspectors
- 1Someone employed to inspect things, examining them carefully as part of the job.
A building inspector must approve the wiring before the walls can be closed up.
School inspectors arrived unannounced and sat in on three classes.
Similarexaminer
Note
Government watchdogs carry the title inspector general, with the adjective after the noun, and the plural puts its -s on the first word. Jennifer Hansler's 2025 report on USAID uses both: its watchdog had served as inspector general since December 2023, while President Donald Trump had fired inspectors general from more than a dozen federal agencies in his first week in office.
- 2In many police forces, an officer holding a rank above sergeant and below superintendent.
After twelve years on the force, she was promoted to inspector and given command of a team of sergeants.
The inspector reported to the superintendent each morning before briefing the detectives.
Note
The rank sits in the middle of the police ladder, above sergeant, so an inspector usually commands a team of sergeants and answers to a superintendent. Where the fuller ladder exists, a chief inspector comes between the two, and a detective of the rank is a detective inspector. As a title it is capitalized and goes before the surname.
- 3A software tool for examining something, such as the elements of a web page or the contents of a disk.
The developer used the browser's inspector to find which style rule was hiding the button.
The disk inspector flagged two system files that had changed since the last scan.
Note
Software borrows the job title for tools that look inside something and report what they find. In Chrome, as Adam McDaniel describes in HTML5 (2011), the inspector shows a page's HTML elements, the files, cookies and databases in use, and its network activity; a disk inspector instead compares programs and system areas with their original state. Each is named for what it examines or the program it lives in.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from Latin īnspector, from īnspiciō; it is equivalent to inspect + -or.