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

Likely to avoid other bad actors circumventing safeguards, xAI did not include examples of Harwood’s successful prompts or describe methods used to bypass filters. — Ashley Belanger, ArsTechnica, 16 July 2026

The opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of vulnerabilities in the system has been well documented. — Lisa Jarvis, Mercury News, 15 July 2026

Left unchecked, a single bad actor can become a network, a network can become an industry, and billions of taxpayer dollars can go up in smoke. — Mehmet Oz, Boston Herald, 13 July 2026

Without accountability, bad actors can gain an advantage through misleading claims or by ignoring standards that responsible companies follow. — Eric Reicin, Forbes.com, 10 July 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