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 could prevent Share Item Location from aiding bad actors in stalking people and tagging cars to steal. —Emily Dreibelbis Forlini, PCMAG, 11 Nov. 2024

These valuable assets must be protected from unauthorized access by bad actors who want to exploit them for their own gain or to harm a person or company. —Adrian Bridgwater, Forbes, 4 Nov. 2024

Frivolous legal challenges and serial open-record requests by bad actors drain resources, diverting time and energy from essential election tasks. —Clifford Tatum, Fortune, 4 Nov. 2024

Instead of operating under a single nationwide system, elections are generally run on the county level, with some states like Wisconsin and Michigan running elections through thousands of municipal clerks -- an arrangement that helps prevent bad actors from causing large-scale systemic problems. —Peter Charalambous, ABC News, 4 Nov. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1879, in the meaning defined above