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

The two former employees of X who both worked under Musk said in interviews Monday that geolocation data received by the company wasn’t always accurate and could be manipulated by bad actors, in part because of how common VPN software has become. —Kevin Collier, NBC news, 25 Nov. 2025

For now, the notion that there might be false labels could give any bad actor the ability to claim they’ve been mislabeled. —Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic, 24 Nov. 2025

The bill would codify the federal government’s authority to remove bad actors from ACA marketplaces and require marketplaces to regularly to confirm enrollee eligibility and that enrollees haven’t died. —Nathaniel Weixel, The Hill, 21 Nov. 2025

But with the legal questions over the elections unresolved, observers warned that the first general elections since 2016 could well open the door to bad actors. —Jacqueline Charles, Miami Herald, 21 Nov. 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