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 defendants fear that the suit may embolden bad actors to weaponize copyright law against talented and successful authors. —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 6 Jan. 2025

After a man hopped behind the wheel of an autonomous Waymo vehicle and tried to drive off, the company offered assurances that the car’s technology includes protections against bad actors. —Noah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times, 4 Jan. 2025

Phishing is when bad actors try to obtain sensitive information for fraudulent purposes. —Brittney Melton, NPR, 27 Dec. 2024

But the history of the Middle East has demonstrated that the demise of a bad actor is not sufficient to produce better ones. —Arash Azizi, The Atlantic, 17 Dec. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1879, in the meaning defined above