Instigators

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Individuals who provoke others into taking specific actions or behaviors
2. People who incite or stimulate particular actions or reactions from others
3. Persons who start or provoke specific events or behaviors in others

Etymology: "Instigators" is the plural of "instigator," a noun for someone who urges others into action, often into trouble. The root goes back to Latin "instigare," meaning to incite, set on, or stimulate, and it is linked to a much older idea of sharpness: the Proto-Indo-European root behind it is thought to mean "to be sharp, to stab, or to puncture," the same notion that gives us words for goading an animal forward. So at its deepest level, to instigate someone is to prod them, the way a herder pricks cattle with a sharp stick. The noun was formed in Latin from that verb with the agent ending "-or," which marks the doer of an action, and it passed into English through French, where the matching form "instigateur" also exists. The English word is therefore an inherited Latin formation rather than a coinage of its own, and it carried the sense of spurring a person on well before it came to suggest anything malicious.

Synonyms: provocateurs, inciters

Antonyms: pacifiers, calmers