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

Over a billion people use Facebook, which means a lot of bad actors are also on the platform trying to exploit users. —Kurt Knutsson, FOXNews.com, 5 Aug. 2025

Today's most expansive domain-blocking tools can help safeguard brands across the very domain spaces most likely to be exploited, including the newer, lower-cost extensions that bad actors frequently target. —Phil Lodico, Forbes.com, 4 Aug. 2025

However, Freedom of the Press Foundation now says that a bug allowed an unknown bad actor to scrub mentions of Blackman's arrest from the Internet. —Ryan Whitwam, ArsTechnica, 30 July 2025

Now, bad actors can pick up an entire malware kit via a black market site just as easily as the average consumer can make an Amazon purchase. —Damon Fleury, Forbes.com, 21 July 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