Criminal

How to spell criminal

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce criminal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does criminal mean?

1. nounA person who has committed a crime or broken the law.
2. adjectiveRelating to crime or punishable by law.

Criminal in a sentence

• noun

  The police finally caught the criminal after a long investigation.

• adjective

  The company faced criminal charges over the safety failures.

• noun

  A convicted criminal cannot easily find regular work afterwards.

• adjective

  Fraud on that scale is a serious criminal offence.

Where does criminal come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin crimen, which originally meant an accusation, a charge, or the verdict that followed it, rather than the wrongdoing itself; crimen in turn grew from cernere, meaning 'to decide' or 'to sift', the same root that lies behind 'discern' and 'certain'. From crimen Latin built the adjective criminalis, meaning 'relating to a charge or to crime', and English took the word in through Old French criminal during the late 1300s. Over time the sense narrowed from the legal accusation toward the guilty act and the guilty person, so that today it labels both the deed and the doer. The spelling preserves the single 'm' and the 'crimin-' stem intact, which is worth fixing in memory because the unstressed middle vowel can tempt a writer to drop or alter it.

How the word is built

• crimin- (from crimen: charge, offence)
• -al (adjective/noun suffix)