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Answer for the clue "A secret listener to private conversations ", 12 letters:
eavesdropper

Alternative clues for the word eavesdropper

Word definitions for eavesdropper in dictionaries

WordNet Word definitions in WordNet
n. a secret listener to private conversations

The Collaborative International Dictionary Word definitions in The Collaborative International Dictionary
Eavesdropper \Eaves"drop`per\, n. One who stands under the eaves, or near the window or door of a house, to listen; hence, a secret listener.

Wiktionary Word definitions in Wiktionary
n. one who eavesdrops

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary Word definitions in Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
mid-15c., with agent-noun ending + Middle English eavesdrop , from Old English yfesdrype "place around a house where the rainwater drips off the roof," from eave (q.v.) + drip (v.). Technically, "one who stands at walls or windows to overhear what's going ...

Usage examples of eavesdropper.

Once I was settled in front of her with a plate of curried chicken stew with mango in it, plain rice and a couple of pop-padoms, she looked to left and right as if checking for eavesdroppers and leant forward over her nearly empty plate.

There was an eavesdropper to all of the foregoing Conant, squatting behind his great desk in the vault, where he had his sanctum sanctorum, knew nothing of it.

He looked from side to side, as if checking on eavesdroppers, then leant over the table, lowering his voice.

It was furnished as a sitting room-evidently Runkle thought that a ground floor sitting room might be too accessible to eavesdroppers.

Because Pemulis always conducts business solo and speaks no French, the whole transaction with the Nuck in charge had to be negotiated in dumbshow, and since this lumberjackish Antitoi Nuckwad tended to look from side to side before he communicated even more than Pemulis looked all around himself, with his dim-looking partner standing there cradling a broom and also scanning for eavesdroppers in the closed shop the whole time, the whole negotiated deal had resembled a kind of group psychomotor seizure, with different bits of whipping and waggling heads reflected in dislocated sections and at jagged angles in more mirrors and pebbled blown-glass vases than Pemulis had ever seen crammed into anywhere.

The table was cleared of all but the decanter and the servants were dismissed before Wyme spoke, and even then softly, as if he feared eavesdroppers.

It would be safer to speak Yhelle and not to be understood by eavesdroppers.

No eavesdropper could have sworn that Art Bonner was speaking to the soon-to-be-notorious felon, Anthony Rand.

It indicated that Sheff suspected an eavesdropper without fully realizing it.

It replaced listening posts in Bremerhaven, Germany, and in Morocco, and soon became host to Army and Air Force eavesdroppers as well.

Even a gadgety spy movie was better than sitting in his stuffy room with its thin walls, an inadvertent eavesdropper to the drinking parties and arguments in the other rooms.

They conversed together figuratively, and by the use of symbols, lest cowans and eavesdroppers might overhear: and there existed among them a favored class, or Order, who were initiated into certain Mysteries which they were bound by solemn promise not to disclose, or even converse about, except with such as had received them under the same sanction.

The traffic and signal analysts have their Communications Analysis Association, the cryptanalysts have their Kryptos Society, and the intercept operators have their Collection Association, which presents an award to the best eavesdropper of the year.

Where the National Sigint Operations Center had been the exclusive club of the eavesdroppers and codebreakers, Minihan brought in the Infosec folks and renamed it the National Security Operations Center.

Fortunately for the eavesdroppers, the Japanese negotiators frequently bypassed secure, encrypted phones because insecure hotel telephones were more readily available and easier to use.