1 [usuallybeforenoun] connected with or involving crime:
criminal offences / behaviour * criminal damage (= the crime of damaging sb's property deliberately) * criminal negligence (= the illegal act of sb failing to do sth that they should do, with the result that sb else is harmed)
2 [onlybeforenoun] connected to the laws that deal with crime:
criminal law * the criminal justice system * a criminal lawyer * to bring criminal charges against sb
compareCIVIL
3 morally wrong:
This is a criminal waste of resources.
noun a person who commits a crime:
Society does not know how to deal with hardened criminals (= people who regularly commit crimes and are not sorry for what they do). * (especially AmE) a career criminal
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for criminal is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is criminal a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, criminal is tagged as adjective.
Does criminal appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — criminal appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
