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

Recent investigations like OpenLux and the 2017 series Panama Papers, however, reveal how bad actors also sometimes use these havens to launder illicit cash and evade taxes. —Deena Sabry, Miami Herald, 7 Nov. 2025

Haraburda said bad actors are aiming to weave together all types of information about you to gain access to your bank accounts, steal your ID or even create a new ID. —Susan Tompor, Freep.com, 4 Nov. 2025

On the other, the ability for bad actors to exploit those ballooning piles of data has grown in tandem. —Leo Schwartz, Fortune, 3 Nov. 2025

But at the same time, bad actors have abused the satellite internet system. —PC Magazine, 3 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