Perpetrator

How to spell perpetrator

11 letters · 4 syllables

16 of the 45 people asked to spell perpetrator in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is perpertrator. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

perpertrator perpetrator

What people typed instead

• perpertrator5 people

How to pronounce perpetrator

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does perpetrator mean?

1. nounA person who carries out a crime, deception, or other harmful or wrongful act.

Perpetrator in a sentence

• The security footage clearly identified the perpetrator of the break-in.

• Investigators traced the fraud back to a single perpetrator working alone.

Where does perpetrator come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb perpetrare, meaning 'to accomplish' or 'to carry through to completion', formed from the intensifying prefix per-, meaning 'thoroughly', and patrare, meaning 'to bring about' or 'to perform'. In classical Latin the verb was perfectly neutral and could describe completing any deed, good or bad. When it passed into English in the sixteenth century, it narrowed sharply to mean carrying out something wrong, a crime, a blunder, or an outrage, and the agent noun perpetrator settled into the language as the person who commits such an act. That hidden Latin patrare is the root that explains the puzzling middle of the spelling: the sequence is per-petr-ator, not 'perp-a-trator', so it is worth fixing the 'petr' chunk in mind. The shorter, slangy 'perp' of crime dramas is simply a clipped form of this longer word.

How the word is built

• per- (thoroughly)
• petr- (from Latin patrare: to bring about, accomplish)
• -ator (agent noun: one who does)

People who misspell perpetrator also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got perpetrator wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• connoisseur 100% of them got it wrong