cad

noun \ ˈkad \

Updated on: 20 Apr 2018

Definition of cad

1 : a bus conductor

2 : a man who acts with deliberate disregard for another's feelings or rights

a selfish cad

See cad defined for English-language learners

See cad defined for kids

Examples of cad in a Sentence

He is a cad, not a gentleman.
he's the type of cad who readily bad-mouths every girl who's ever dumped him

Recent Examples of cad from the Web

Roxy’s mother and stepfather fly to Paris to plead with Roxy to divorce the cad and return to Santa Barbara.

— WSJ, "Five Best: Jenny Allen," 13 Apr. 2018
Eva might meet the perfect guy (Jason Lewis), but can't break the spell of her attraction to cads, or embrace her 40-something body as-is.

— amy nicholson, chicagotribune.com, "'Half Magic' review: Heather Graham casts a spell in her writing-directing debut," 22 Feb. 2018
Hanks, meanwhile is having a ball as Bradlee, a charming and crass cad with a mission and an army of capable reporters trying to get the story.

— lindsey bahr, kansascity, "In ‘The Post,’ Spielberg, Streep and Hanks deliver," 11 Jan. 2018
Her depiction of Hanna Glawari — the widow of the title, who is sought-after by cads and diplomats alike for her inherited wealth — had low-key charm.

— zachary woolfe, New York Times, "Review: ‘The Merry Widow’ at the Met, Its Charm Exhausted," 15 Dec. 2017
What sort of cad cheats on Emma Thompson? Alan Rickman’s glasses.

— connie ogle, miamiherald, "Why we actually love ‘Love Actually’ | Miami Herald," 23 Dec. 2014
Though Lance has fun playing a bounder and cad of the first order, the script doesn’t particularly need him.

— jonathan holland, The Hollywood Reporter, "‘The Bookshop’: Film Review," 20 Nov. 2017
The men in these women’s lives are, thankfully, neither boors nor cads.

— elizabeth kerr, The Hollywood Reporter, "'Love Education': Film Review | Busan 2017," 23 Oct. 2017
The duke may be an odious womanizer and cad, but Polenzani sang the serial seducer so impeccably and played him so passionately as to turn his severe character flaws into charming positives.

— john von rhein, chicagotribune.com, "Vocal sparks fly in Lyric Opera's riveting 'Rigoletto'," 8 Oct. 2017

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'cad.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

The origins of cad

You might wonder how the word cad came to refer to both a bus conductor and a disagreeable man. Were the bus drivers of yore thought to be particularly unsavory characters? Not necessarily, and there is a reasonable explanation for how we arrived at the most common meaning of this word today (that is, the one for a badly-behaved man).

In 18th-century Scotland, caddie had the meaning “one that waits about for odd jobs.” Shortened to cad, this word took on the additional senses “an unbooked coach passenger” (one who, presumably, waited about for a ride) and “an unskilled assistant or laborer.” The “unbooked passenger” meaning seems to have led to the “omnibus conductor” one. The “odd job-seeker” or “unskilled laborer” sense, for its part, developed into the “disagreeable man” sense at Oxford University, where students applied cad in a dismissive fashion to job-seeking townsmen whom they considered vulgar.