nominee
Pluralnominees
- 1A person named or designated by another to an office, duty, or position, or proposed by others for election to office.
The president's nominee for the court faced tough questioning from the panel.
Voters will choose among three nominees in the spring primary.
Similarcandidate, choice, pick, appointee
Note
Built from nominate plus -ee, the suffix that marks the person something is done to, as in appointee or employee. A nominee has been named but not necessarily chosen. The word holds the gap between nomination and outcome, which is why a party's nominee still faces voters and a president's nominee still faces confirmation. Its active counterpart is the nominator, the one who does the naming.
- 2A person or organization in whose name a security is registered while true ownership rests with another party, the nominator, often to conceal the nominator's identity.
The brokerage acted as nominee, registering the bonds while the investor stayed anonymous.
Offshore nominees concealed who actually controlled the company's stock.
Note
Finance turns the passive suffix into a legal screen. The nominee's name sits on the register while the nominator keeps the real ownership. The usual construction is to hold shares through nominees, and it can carry an edge of concealment: the Supreme Court confiscated half of Thaksin Shinawatra's fortune after finding he had held company shares that way while Prime Minister. In ordinary custodial holdings, the same arrangement is routine.
- 3Under the copyhold system of land tenure, the person to whom a copyholder gives up their interest in the estate.
Upon surrender, the copyholder's interest passed to the nominee named in the manor roll.
The steward entered the nominee's name in the manor court records.
Note
A term of manorial land law. A copyholder did not hand land straight to a buyer. The interest was surrendered to the lord of the manor, who admitted the person the copyholder had named, and the transfer was entered on the court roll. That act of naming makes this person a nominee, the same idea as someone put forward for office, applied to land.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from 'nominate' combined with the suffix '-ee'.