noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   A person who carries out business in an immoral or exploitative way, but does not necessarily break the law, and is protected from consequences by a veneer of social respectability.

Etymology

From criminal + -oid, coined by E. A. Ross in Sin and Society (1907).

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.