culprit
Americannoun
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culprits
plural
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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
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
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.
See Examples For:
But hitting into double plays has been a major culprit behind the Dodgers’ recent offensive struggles.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 9, 2026
The country’s interior minister said the incident represented “a new level of danger,” pointing to a sophisticated foreign actor as the potential culprit.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 7, 2026
Then on Wednesday, nearly a week after Hugging Face raised the alarm, the true culprit was unmasked.
From BBC ● Jul. 24, 2026
But a specific food item or culprit has yet to be named.
From Salon ● Jul. 20, 2026
The culprit was a falcon thief named Bate.
From "Frightful's Mountain" by Jean Craighead George
In 2024 then–Surgeon General Vivek Murthy identified one of the main culprits: “A ‘culture of comparison’—often perpetuated online—around milestones, parenting and achievements, ‘has left many families feeling exhausted, burned out, and perpetually behind.’
From Slate ● Aug. 11, 2026
Many of the culprits then were the same as those still driving extinctions across the nation today.
From BBC ● Aug. 8, 2026
The biggest culprits were young Israelis, the report found.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 2, 2026
Crisps, chocolate bars and ice cream are identified as the culprits of this tendency, which the study viewed as "representing an early form of self-medication".
From Barron's ● May 22, 2026
She sits down, obviously pleased that the culprits have been caught.
From "Monster" by Walter Dean Myers
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.
