A. An employee who reports employer wrongdoing to a governmental or law-enforcement agency.
Listen to pronunciationLegal Definition - An employee who reports employer wrongdoing to a governmental or law-enforcement agency. Black's Law Dictionary® Eighth Edition © 2004
Grammar Note - You may see this word written as 2 words "whistle blower" or hyphenated "whistle-blower" or as 1 compound noun "whistleblower". This shows how compound nouns evolve in English from 2 exiting words, then to a hyphenated word and finally becoming a single solid word as soon as their use in English is accepted as permanent. As reflected in this entry, Black's Legal Dictionary gives the word as a single solid compound thus reflecting permanent acceptance in legal English.
Recent Usage -
"A tiny Virginia bank, at the heart of a closely watched case testing the nation's protection of corporate whistle-blowers, must reinstate an executive it fired after he criticized accounting practices, a federal labor board has ruled. The ruling, by the Department of Labor's Administrative Review Board, is far from the final word in the long-running dispute between Cardinal Bankshares Corp. and David Welch, its former chief financial officer. But it is an important step, for the two sides and for many companies that have followed the case closely. The ruling, dated June 9 but not made public until yesterday, denies a request by Cardinal a holding company for the Bank of Floyd in Southwest Virginia -- to stay a Labor Department judge's earlier order that it take Welch back. In 2004, Welch became the first worker to win protection as a whistle-blower under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed by Congress in 2002 after corporate scandals at Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc. and other companies. Cardinal has refused to reinstate Welch." read more
