bad actor

noun

plural bad actors

: a person, group, country, etc. who purposely and usually repeatedly engages in very bad behavior (such as committing crimes or causing harm to others)

Giving users a way to prove that they're being harassed with, say, a screenshot or some other form of authentication could help Twitter catch bad actors, even after they've covered their tracks.

—Issie Lapowsky

A perennial diplomatic bad actor, North Korea has already rattled its sabers at the opening of the Obama administration.

—Alex Kingsbury

"We've got to break away from the notion," as the U.A.W.'s [United Auto Workers] director of public relations, Peter G. Laarman, puts it, "that labor is a 'bad actor' in the economy. …"

—Harry Stein

also : something that causes trouble, danger, or a problem

The bad actor in male pattern hair loss is DHT, a metabolic product of testosterone.

—Jane E. Brody

We have special ducts throughout the vapor bath that carry away all the toxic bad actors.

—PC Today

Examples of bad actor in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Regulators demand the ability to identify, freeze, or block assets linked to bad actors in real time. —Lior Lamesh, Forbes, 3 Mar. 2025

Punishing bad actors is an area of overlap with Senate Republicans. —Kate Wolffe, Sacramento Bee, 14 Feb. 2025

But bad actors kept spinning up new numbers and escaping scrutiny anyway. —Jenna McLaughlin, NPR, 2 Feb. 2025

In our interview in June, Ou acknowledged that battery fires were a problem but blamed them on bad actors elsewhere in the industry. —Jesse Coburn, Curbed, 31 Jan. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1879, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for bad actor

• attractor
• cofactor
• compactor
• contactor
• contractor
• distractor
• extractor
• impactor
• protractor
• reactor
• redactor
• refractor