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

But bad actors have learned to weaponize that same amendment as a shield, flooding the information ecosystem with content designed to discreetly destabilize our communities. —Julian Baron, Baltimore Sun, 19 Apr. 2026

The Los Angeles County Office of Education is investigating the possibility that bad actors gained access to the electronic tax documents of teachers and administrators after employees at schools around the county received letters indicating fraudulent tax filings had been submitted in their names. —Jason Henry, Daily News, 18 Apr. 2026

DeviantArt’s Protect feature uses state-of-the-art image recognition to help safeguard creators’ work against unauthorized use, and the platform employs a dedicated team to investigate and mitigate the impact from spam, scams, fraud, and other bad actors. —The Editors Of Artnews, ARTnews.com, 17 Apr. 2026

Preventing Minnesota from issuing non-iron mining permits to bad actors who have violated specific international laws, such as corruption and bribery or natural resource destruction. —Mary Murphy, Twin Cities, 17 Apr. 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