Malicious

How to spell malicious

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce malicious

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does malicious mean?

1. adjectiveShowing a deliberate desire to harm or cause distress to others.

Malicious in a sentence

• The company traced the data breach to a piece of malicious software.

• She was suspended after spreading malicious rumours about a colleague.

Where does malicious come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin adjective malus, meaning simply 'bad' or 'evil', from which the noun malitia developed to mean 'badness' or 'ill will'. Romans used malitia for the kind of deliberate spite that wants to harm another person, and that flavour of intentional cruelty carried through. The word reached English in the 1200s by way of Old French malicios, which kept the sense of wickedness and bad intent. The same Latin malus underlies a whole family of English words built on the idea of badness, including 'malice', 'malign', 'malevolent', and 'malady'. The spelling trap sits in the ending: the sound is 'shus' but it is written -cious, and there is only a single l, not a double one, because the root is mal-, not mall-.

How the word is built

• mal- (bad, evil)
• -ic- (from Latin malitia, ill will)
• -ious (full of)