Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

delinquent

UK/dɪˈlɪŋkwənt/
nounB2+Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,146 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: delinquents

A delinquent is a young person who keeps breaking the law. A juvenile delinquent, a young delinquent, delinquent behaviour.

Juvenile delinquent is the fixed phrase, and it belongs to the mid twentieth century, when it was everywhere. In American finance the word means something different and unrelated: a delinquent account is one behind on its payments.

Definitions of delinquent

  1. 1noundelinquentA young person who keeps breaking the law.B2+

    “The youth club gives teenage delinquents something to do besides stealing cars.”

delinquent is a person.

Where it comes from

Latin delinquens comes from delinquere, to fail or offend — de plus linquere, to leave.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *leykʷ-

  2. Latin

    delinquens

  3. Middle French

    délinquant

  4. English, today

    delinquent

Borrowed from Middle French délinquant, ultimately from Latin delinquens, present participle of delinquo.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

delinquent in the wild

  • Many delinquent acts can be attributed to the environmental factors such as family behavior or peer influence.

    Juvenile delinquency

  • Belfield was once home to the Belfield Girls' School, a school for delinquent girls, founded in 1949.

    Belfield, Guyana

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.