adjective
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characterized by malice
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motivated by wrongful, vicious, or mischievous purposes
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of malicious
First recorded in 1175–1225; Middle English malicius, from Old French, from Latin malitiōsus; see malice, -ous
Explanation
Someone who is malicious enjoys hurting or embarrassing others. If you're writing a book about good and evil, you'll want to come up with a truly malicious character to do all the bad stuff. Malicious is the adjective based on the noun malice, which means the desire to harm others. Both words come from the Latin word malus, for bad. If someone is malicious he doesn't just make bad things happen; he loves to make bad things happen.
Vocabulary lists containing malicious
The SAT: Words to Capture Tone, List 2
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Fake It 'Til You Make It: Synonyms for "False"
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The New SAT: Words to Capture Tone
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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.
But she was the one that the paparazzi hounded most fiercely, feeding malicious tabloid coverage focused on her body image and weight.
From Salon ● Aug. 19, 2026
Wiener’s campaign said the chatbot was created with “strict guardrails” and designed to ignore controversial and malicious prompts and pivot back to Chan’s policy record.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 11, 2026
In it, Anthropic’s Mythos 5 ventured out on the internet and tried to trick two unidentified developers into adding malicious software to their open-source coding project.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 5, 2026
Throughout the attempts, it was human review that stopped the agent from succeeding in delivering the malicious code to GitHub.
From BBC ● Aug. 5, 2026
“Still, I was being malicious, stirring things up between the two of you. I’m so sorry.”
From "The Red Car to Hollywood" by Jennie Liu
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.
