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

On many occasions, these vulnerabilities were years-old, zero-day flaws that bad actors didn’t have the means to attack. — Ali El Kaafarani, Forbes.com, 1 Oct. 2026

The decrease in gut bacteria diversity was tied to expansions in populations of certain bad actors, such as the bacteria Enterococcus faecium. — Brenda Goodman, CNN Money, 1 Oct. 2026

But three years later, the Microsoft cofounder and the onetime world’s richest man is warning that bad actors can use the technology to kill on a mass scale. — Mia Osmonbekov, Fortune, 30 Sep. 2026

There’s always going to be bad actors, and that’s where like something like the No FAKES Act needs to sort of get solidified and all that by the government. — Corbin Bolies, Variety, 30 Sep. 2026

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