Malevolent means wishing harm on other people. Not angry — settled in the wish.
It is built from Latin parts meaning wishing badly, and its exact opposite, benevolent, means wishing well, so the two are best learned as a pair. It describes stares, presences and forces rather than ordinary rudeness, which is why it belongs to ghost stories and to serious writing about cruelty. The noun is malevolence. What separates it from cruel is that cruelty acts and malevolence only has to want.
1adjectivemalevolentWishing harm to others.
“There was something malevolent about the whole place.”
Malevolent is wishing badly. Latin male, badly, plus volēns, wishing, from velle, to want, so a malevolent person is defined by what they wish for rather than by what they do.
Proto-Indo-European
*welh₁-
Latin
malevolēns
Old French
malivolent
Middle English
*malevolent
English, today
malevolent
Built from
From Middle English malevolent (suggested by Middle English malevolence), from Old French malivolent and Latin malevolēns, from male (“badly, wrongly”) + volens (“willing, wishing”), from velle (“to wish”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA