One who advocates; a person who speaks in favor of or argues for a cause or belief.
From Latin advocator, meaning one who is called to help or defend. It combines advocatus with the agent suffix -or. This form competed with 'advocate' for centuries but is now mostly obsolete.
English had both 'advocate' and 'advocator' as competing words for the same meaning, and 'advocate' won out—this happens constantly in language, where synonyms battle it out and one gets forgotten, like how we ditched 'regarder' in favor of 'one who regards.'
Agent-noun '-or' historically defaulted to male in legal Latin (vs. '-rix' for women). 'Advocator' carries implicit maleness in historical legal texts.
Use 'advocate' as gender-neutral primary term. 'Advocator' acceptable in historical/Latin contexts only.
["advocate","proponent"]
Women who served as legal advocates in Roman law were often erased by gendered terminology—their arguments survived even when their names were minimized.
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