culprit
Other forms: culprits
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.
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someone who perpetrates wrongdoingsynonyms: perpetrator
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Vocabulary lists containing culprit
Language change is driven by mistakes. If every generation of children learned perfectly what they heard spoken around them, then languages would be exact duplicates of themselves, stretching years into the past. But this isn't what happens. Errors, mishearings, inversion of sounds, dropping and adding of sounds, all these phenomena and more drive historical language change. You'll find a few of these systematic inconsistencies that result in other word forms below, as well as singular instances that don't fit a pattern where linguists can pinpoint exactly what went "wrong."
Where there's a will, there's a motive to solve a murder. When eccentric millionaire Sam Westing dies, he leaves instructions for sixteen people to come to the reading of his will. With a fortune on the line, Westing's death becomes a puzzle they'll race to solve.
Data scientist Matt Daniels examined the vocabulary of several rap artists' lyrical output and found them to be quite extensive, rivaling in size the vocabularies of some of the greatest authors who have ever written in English. Here is the list of the top 25 rappers, in descending order of vocabulary size (as demonstrated by their lyrics). Let's celebrate the ingenuity of the rappers highlighted with this list of 25 great turns of phrase which contain memorable vocabulary!