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The Origins of Cad
You might wonder how the word cad came to refer to both a bus conductor and a disagreeable man. Were the bus drivers of yore thought to be particularly unsavory characters? Not necessarily, and there is a reasonable explanation for how we arrived at the most common meaning of this word today (that is, the one for a badly-behaved man).
In 18th-century Scotland, caddie had the meaning “one that waits about for odd jobs.” Shortened to cad, this word took on the additional senses “an unbooked coach passenger” (one who, presumably, waited about for a ride) and “an unskilled assistant or laborer.” The “unbooked passenger” meaning seems to have led to the “omnibus conductor” one. The “odd job-seeker” or “unskilled laborer” sense, for its part, developed into the “disagreeable man” sense at Oxford University, where students applied cad in a dismissive fashion to job-seeking townsmen whom they considered vulgar.
Examples of cad in a Sentence
Bethy Squires, Vulture, 9 Jan. 2026
Facing pressure to sire a child, Jerome tosses a crude wager the way of his dashing but dim-witted Lothario-like chum Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine) – a bet that the handsome cad won’t be able to woo Cherry and bed her while he’s gone for 100 nights.
—Randy Myers, Mercury News, 3 Dec. 2025
As long as these self-promoting cads are in charge, things can only get worse.
—Letters To The Editor, The Orlando Sentinel, 15 July 2025
As Bertram, Gabriel Brown played well the spoiled and despicable cad.
—Pam Kragen, San Diego Union-Tribune, 7 July 2025
See All Example Sentences for cad
Cite this Entry
“Cad.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cad. Accessed 14 Mar. 2026.
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