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

The integrity of the tax system demands that bad actors be prosecuted. —Marie Sapirie, Forbes.com, 26 Jan. 2026

The state trooper assigned to the state office building is the person the most likely targets of a bad actor have been counting on to pay attention and be ready to notice and react to a problem. —Kevin Rennie, Hartford Courant, 24 Jan. 2026

The world is full of bad actors—cheats, liars, tyrants, sickos—who are, ultimately, mere human beings; at least, this was how rationality would have it. —Joshua Rothman, New Yorker, 23 Jan. 2026

Even Republicans who sometimes refrain from endorsing the president’s most unhinged demands seem to believe that the ICE protests have no legitimacy and that Minnesota’s Democratic officials are, if not outright criminals, bad actors. —Jonathan Chait, The Atlantic, 22 Jan. 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