Other forms: culprits
The culprit is the person who did the wrong thing. Find the culprit, the real culprit, the usual culprits.
It is used of people and, very often, of causes: the culprit was a faulty valve, damp is the usual culprit. That second use is the commoner one in everyday speech and takes all the moral weight out of the word. Note that culprit came from a clerk's abbreviation in Anglo-Norman court records that was misread as a form of address to the accused — a mistake that became a word.
1nounculpritThe person who did the wrong thing.
“The teacher looked around the class for the culprit who had drawn on the board.”
2nouncauseThe cause of a problem.
“My phone battery kept dying, and the culprit turned out to be a faulty app.”
culprit is a guilty party or cause.
Anglo-Norman court records abbreviated culpable prest, meaning guilty and ready to prove it, as cul. prit. English readers took it for a word addressed to the defendant, and the mistake became the noun.
Built from
From Anglo-Norman - cul. prit, contraction of culpable: prest (deaverrer nostre bille) 'guilty: ready (to prove our case)', words used by prosecutor in opening a trial, mistaken in English for an address to the defendant. See culpable. It may have been influenced by culpa (“blame, fault”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA