Culprit

How to spell culprit

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce culprit

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does culprit mean?

1. nounThe person or thing responsible for a fault, crime, or problem.

Culprit in a sentence

• The security footage finally revealed the culprit who damaged the car.

• After weeks of debugging, a single missing comma turned out to be the culprit.

Where does culprit come from?

Language of origin: French

This word has one of the stranger origins in English, born from a courtroom abbreviation. In Anglo-French legal proceedings, when a prisoner pleaded not guilty, the prosecutor would respond with something like 'culpable, prest', meaning roughly 'guilty, and ready to prove it'. Clerks abbreviated this to 'cul. prest', and over time the two clipped words fused into 'culprit', which by the late 1600s simply meant the accused person standing trial. The first part comes from the Latin culpa, meaning 'fault' or 'blame', the same root that gives us 'culpable' and 'exculpate'. The spelling trap is that there is no doubled letter and no 'e', just the single -rit ending left over from that frozen legal shorthand.

How the word is built

• culp- (from Latin culpa: fault, blame)
• -rit (from an old Anglo-French courtroom phrase)