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

Voice and messaging have traditionally been viewed as separate channels, but customers no longer experience them that way, and bad actors are increasingly exploiting the disconnect. — Scott Hambuchen, Forbes.com, 23 July 2026

Trust and safety systems should stop bad actors without creating unnecessary friction for honest users. — Larry Magid, Mercury News, 23 July 2026

Trump said China had accessed voter data of 220 million people in 18 states, but that information is generally publicly available and does not contain information that would allow a bad actor to change votes or hack into an election system. — Justine McDaniel, Los Angeles Times, 17 July 2026

Likely to avoid other bad actors circumventing safeguards, xAI did not include examples of Harwood’s successful prompts or describe methods used to bypass filters. — Ashley Belanger, ArsTechnica, 16 July 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