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I'm not a native speaker.
Earlier today I struggled to find the passive form of "checker", that is, the one who was checked.

Maybe more precisely, the one who received the checking.
My context is a peer reviews project. Consider an assignment handed to students in school, where the students check each other's work. In such a situation, there's the checker and the one being checked.

Can you help me figure it out?
Thanks!

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  • The one who has checked on something may be called a checker (inspector?). The one who i checked is not a checker. More context, please. I don't think checker is the word you need here.
    – Ricky
    Jan 24, 2016 at 20:46
  • I tried to clear it up.. let me know what you think.
    – Neta
    Jan 24, 2016 at 20:51
  • Checked for what? Rabies? Checked by whom? I'm afraid I'm still not grasping it.
    – Ricky
    Jan 24, 2016 at 20:55
  • Sorry, I'll just reveal my context.
    – Neta
    Jan 24, 2016 at 21:30
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    The general suffix that can be used for this purpose is -ee, but new words coined using it sound stupid/humorous in my opinion, and there seem to be a fair amount of people who agree with me. I'd recommend just using a phrase, like you did in this question--"the one being checked."
    – herisson
    Jan 24, 2016 at 22:37

2 Answers 2

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Well, then the reviewer (the one doing the checking) and the reviewee (the one who's work is being checked (reviewed)) seem to be the obvious choices.

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    Obvious or not, 'reviewee' is the standard term used by editorial staff for peer-reviewed journals.
    – JEL
    Jan 25, 2016 at 2:33
  • I should add that the term is not often needed: the usual is to contrast 'authors' and 'reviewers' when referencing particular task agents for a given ms.
    – JEL
    Jan 25, 2016 at 2:39
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    @JEL; Yes, indeed. However, detailed, intelligent discourse on usage is impossible on this forum without a complete overhaul of the rules and rep points system. You can't very well expect me to write an essay on the above topic knowing full well that all I can get for it is one upvote and (very likely) three downvotes and a close vote to boot while one-line answers from just about anyone garner a hundred points or more all the time.
    – Ricky
    Jan 25, 2016 at 3:01
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In general, English does not have a grammatical form for nominalising the recipient of an action. It often has a verbal form, the passive, as you say "be checked"; but there is no regular way of forming a noun meaning "person being checked". I can't think of a more compact form than that which will be clear.

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    It's not that common, but reviewee seems reasaonable to me - and (somewhat surprisingly, perhaps) it has its own dedicated entry in the full OED, with citations from 1787 to 2007.
    – FumbleFingers
    Jan 24, 2016 at 22:04
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    You're right. But it's unclear how productive -ee is as a suffix. There are also some common instances where it is not passive in meaning: attendee, returnee.
    – Colin Fine
    Jan 24, 2016 at 22:12
  • I used to think the preponderance of questions asking for "matching pairs" like this was because SO has an unusually high proportion of users with backgrounds in programming (they like symmetry). But now I'm wondering whether it's the preponderance of nns (on average, do other languages have more such pairings?) I expect we'd not have attendee meaning what it does if it weren't for the fact that attendant had already been taken for other purposes.
    – FumbleFingers
    Jan 24, 2016 at 22:29
  • @ColinFine: I've seen it argued that -ee is essentially absolutive (in the sense of ergative-absolutive morphosyntactic alignment): when a verb V is transitive, V-ee only ever indicates the patient (never the agent), but when a verb V is intransitive, V-ee may still be possible (even though there's no patient), in which case it indicates the sole argument.
    – ruakh
    Jan 25, 2016 at 0:21
  • Sometimes, both forms mean the same thing: signer/signee. John Hancock is the first signer/signee of the Declaration of Independence.
    – Steven Littman
    Jan 25, 2016 at 0:49

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