Other forms: suspected, suspects, suspecting
A suspect is the person the police believe may have committed a crime. The main suspect, arrest a suspect, three suspects were questioned.
The verb is the same spelling with the stress moved — SUS-pect the noun, sus-PECT the verb — and it means to believe something is probably true, usually something bad: I suspect he knew. It also means to distrust: suspect somebody's motives. The adjective, also SUS-pect, means questionable: a suspect explanation, suspect goods. Note the useful phrase the usual suspects, from Casablanca, meaning the same predictable people rounded up again.
1nounsuspectSomebody the police think may have committed a crime.
“The suspect was released without charge.”
2verbprobablyTo believe something is probably true.
“I suspect nobody read it before it went out.”
3verbguiltyTo believe somebody is guilty.
“They suspected him from the first day.”
4adjectivepossiblyPossibly false or dishonest.
“The whole account looks suspect to me.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
suspect is a person under suspicion.
Latin suspectus is the past participle of suspicere, to look up at — sub-, from below, plus specere, to look. To suspect somebody is to look at them from underneath, which is a precise description of a sideways glance nobody is meant to see.
Proto-Indo-European
*speḱ-
Latin
suspectus
Old French
suspect
English, today
suspect
Built from
From Old French suspect, from Latin suspectus, perfect passive participle of suspiciō (“mistrust, suspect”), from sub (“under”), + speciō (“watch, look at”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA