culprit
101
4.6
- noun
- /ˈkʌlprɪt/
:
culpable
- It's global climate change, and again, the main culprit is coal.
- identify the culprit
- main culprit
- likely culprit
And it's always, you know, the same culprits, money and power, right?
- And it's always, you know, the same culprits, money and power, right?
- And, you know, you feel like the culprit in that on some level.
- Like you want to find one or two main culprits of dis ease in our health.
- But by far and away the large culprit here is sugar, correct, Correct.
- And the culprit ended up being pecans.
- The real culprit, he said, was drug prohibition.
- As it turns out, software was the culprit, and software is notoriously hard to account for.
- That's why, empirically, central banks turn out to be the true culprits.
- But it turns out cosmic rays were probably not the culprit.
Examples
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However, low parental control may be the primary culprit, setting the stage for all sorts of delinquent behavior.
Academic text (2008) -
The detectives finally caught the culprit who had stolen the priceless painting.
-
The fact is, climate change is the real culprit behind what we're seeing right now.
-
One of the officers announced that the culprit had been found.
Fiction book (2002) -
We have found our culprit.
-
The culprit is the Federal Reserve.
-
And it's always, you know, the same culprits, money and power, right?
-
Disasters must have destroyed many books, but the greatest culprit was almost certainly simple decay.
-
The O-rings were the culprit, as far as we know, in both your and my history.
Fiction book (1998) -
We go back to the same culprit, bad laws and tons of senseless regulations.
Synonyms
161
6.8
A person who commits a crime or other serious wrong
8
4.3
A person who breaks the law or hurts other people
1
7.0
A person or thing that makes something happen
1
8.6
A person who is more at fault than someone else
A person who breaks the law, for example by theft or fraud
Antonyms
How Serious
Surface Forms
Etymology
Culprit comes from the old Latin word culpa, which means 'blame' or 'fault'. So a culprit is the person or thing you can 'blame' for a crime, mistake, or problem.