Definition of stool pigeon in US English:
stool pigeon
nounsto͞ol ˈpijənstul ˈpɪdʒən
1A police informer.
Example sentencesExamples
- Willis is on the run, a stool pigeon in flight from Chicago; Perry is in heavy debt, and his calculating, blackmailing wife forces him to squeal to Bruce's vengeful bosses about where the contract killer now lives, for a finder's fee.
- Even if I did like crooks who are stool pigeons, I still wouldn't like you!
- More often, they were prepared to play the stool pigeon not for thirty pieces of silver, but for much more mundane rewards.
- He was a Jew who began his career as a satirist of the Nazis and ended up as their stool pigeon.
- That film concerns a stool pigeon tracked down in Spain after 10 years by hired killers working for the crime boss on whom he has informed.
- When a mob mastermind decides to turn stool pigeon and squawk, it's up to the S.W.A.T. team to protect him.
- He monopolizes the stand to the point that it becomes his designated place to sit as much as any director's chair; he is the star witness and stool pigeon for the prosecution.
- So many American mob killers have turned stool pigeon or gotten themselves arrested.
- The song is about the ‘victim of someone's evil plan’ who gets turned in by a stool pigeon.
- The luckless spy spent most of the war in prisons and internment camps eking out a living as a stool pigeon.
- 1.1 A person acting as a decoy.
Origin
Late 19th century: so named from the original use of a pigeon fixed to a stool as a decoy.