one who promotes (Lat. promovere, to move forward), advances or forwards any scheme, project or undertaking. The most general specific sense in which the word is now used is that of a person who takes the steps necessary to the incorporation of a joint-stock company (see Company) or to the passing of a private or local act of parliament. In legal history, a promoter was one who prosecuted offenders, originally as an officer of the Crown, later as a common informer; the term is still used thus of the prosecutor in a suit in an ecclesiastical court.