culprit
Americannoun
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a person or other agent guilty of or responsible for an offense or fault.
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a person arraigned for an offense.
noun
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law a person awaiting trial, esp one who has pleaded not guilty
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the person responsible for a particular offence, misdeed, etc
Etymology
Origin of culprit
1670–80; traditionally explained as cul (representing Latin culpābilis guilty) + prit (representing Anglo-French prest ready), marking the prosecution as ready to prove the defendant's guilt. See culpable, presto
Explanation
A culprit is a person who does something wrong, like committing a crime. When your wallet got stolen out of your pocket, there was a culprit to blame in the crowd. The word culprit comes from the Anglo French words cul prit, a contraction of culpable, which means "deserving blame." A culprit isn't always a person; it can be anything that caused something bad to happen — even a sock left on the steps can be a culprit if it makes you slip and fall. Don't confuse culprit with scapegoat, which is a person or thing that gets blamed for something it didn't do.
Vocabulary lists containing culprit
Language Gone Wrong: Words That Started Out as Errors
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The Westing Game
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Vocabulary: A Rapper's Delight!
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
"A novel aspect of the paper was our use of powerful mass spectrometry sequencing to identify molecular mimicry between the adenovirus vector protein and the PF4 culprit target," she says.
From Science Daily • Apr. 10, 2026
Antisemitism is rising among young people today, but the culprit isn’t a generation choosing hatred.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 7, 2026
They note that the main culprit was a “catastrophically bad control-room design” where workers “were unable to understand what was going wrong.”
From Slate • Apr. 4, 2026
Recession was the most frequent culprit, responsible for driving losses of 10% or greater in eight of the 12 examples.
From MarketWatch • Mar. 24, 2026
Then, as if suddenly remembering the real culprit, he leaped at Barbarossa, who was still staring in shock at his fingers.
From "The Thief Lord" by Cornelia Funke
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
