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

Dimon said that JPMorgan was testing Anthropic’s latest model — the Mythos preview announced by the AI firm last week — as part of its broader effort to reap the benefits of AI while protecting against bad actors wielding the same technology. —Hugh Son, CNBC, 14 Apr. 2026

Naturally, the issues were patched after discovery, but the complexity of modem code virtually guarantees there are more vulnerabilities lurking inside, ready to be exploited by a bad actor. —Nate Anderson, ArsTechnica, 13 Apr. 2026

But Grundy is banking on movement in Congress to support a bill that strips back the 2025 hemp-banning language while also regulating intoxicating hemp more than the 2018 farm bill did to root out bad actors in the industry and make industrial hemp more stable in the long term. —Molly Parks, The Washington Examiner, 12 Apr. 2026

The regime is bad actors for sure. —ABC News, 12 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