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OneKitly

client

nouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈklaɪ.ənt//

A customer, a buyer or receiver of goods or services.

noun

  1. 1

    A customer, a buyer or receiver of goods or services.

  2. 2

    The role of a computer application or system that requests and/or consumes the services provided by another having the role of server.

  3. 3

    A person who receives help or services from a professional such as a lawyer or accountant.

    I corralled the judge, and we started off across the fields[…]. And thus we came by a circuitous route to Mohair,[…]. My client welcomed the judge […] and they disappeared together into the Ethiopian card-room, which was filled with the assegais and exclamation point shields Mr. Cooke had had made at the sawmill at Beaverton.

  4. 4

    A person who employs or retains an attorney to represent him or her in any legal matter, or one who merely divulges confidential matters to an attorney while pursuing professional assistance without subsequently retaining the attorney.

  5. 5

    historicalIn ancient Rome, retainers and followers associated with a gens.

    The nomen belonged to all members of a gens and to all those attached to it (women, clients, and freedmen included).

  6. 6

    Variant of client stateEllipsis of client state.

    A third preliminary comment deals explicitly with the relations between clients and superpowers.

    Russia’s leader is a conservative, old-school thug. He thinks Russia is still a superpower, not what he’s made it: a despised rogue state and Chinese client.

Etymology

From Middle English client, from Anglo-Norman clyent, Old French client, from Latin cliēns, akin to clinare (“to lean”).

Forms

plural
clients
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).