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

Anthropic limited its release to a few American companies including Apple, Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Palo Alto Networks to reduce the risk that bad actors get their hands on it. —Hugh Son,samantha Subin, CNBC, 8 May 2026

Other bad actors could try and take advantage of the breach's aftermath through additional phishing attacks. —ABC News, 8 May 2026

But civil penalties were removed from the law two decades ago, leaving federal regulators with fewer effective remedies to enforce the law or sanction bad actors. —Quil Lawrence, NPR, 4 May 2026

The album may boast sharper songcraft and even clearer-eyed revolutionary politics, but Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Próvaí are still the same boys from West Belfast, making good trouble to hold bad actors to account. —Jazz Monroe, Pitchfork, 1 May 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