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

This separates the management plane from the data plane so that bad actors who get into the management layer cannot manipulate the data layer. — Eric Herzog, Forbes.com, 25 Sep. 2026

Not just the supposedly existential risk that AI leaders started recently claiming required a slowdown, but also risks from bad actors like hackers or terrorists wielding AI to attack either country’s infrastructure. — Ashley Belanger, ArsTechnica, 23 Sep. 2026

However, there exists no opt-out or protection for third-party sales to countries or concern or bad actors. — Peggy Gossett-Seidman, Sun Sentinel, 23 Sep. 2026

Oz argued that bad actors were attracted to ACA marketplace subsidies during the Covid-19 pandemic, when federal spending surged dramatically. — Annika Kim Constantino, CNBC, 22 Sep. 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