Recidivist
adj, noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 One who falls back into prior habits, especially criminal habits.
"This specimen was of English parentage, was a professional burglar, a confirmed recidivist, and—since he habitually carried firearms—a potential homicide."
- 2 someone who lapses into previous undesirable patterns of behavior wordnet
- 3 someone who is repeatedly arrested for criminal behavior (especially for the same criminal behavior) wordnet
- 1 Tending to fall back into prior habits, especially criminal habits.
"To return to Macbeth, I should like to note another psychological intuition of [William] Shakespeare’s, which is that women commit fewer crimes than men; but when they commit them they are more cruel and more obstinately recidivist than men. Lady Macbeth, for example, is more inhumanly ferocious than her husband."
Example
More examples"This specimen was of English parentage, was a professional burglar, a confirmed recidivist, and—since he habitually carried firearms—a potential homicide."
Etymology
From French récidiviste, from Latin recidīvus (“returning, recurring”). Compare recidivous, -ist. By surface analysis, recidive + -ist.
More for "recidivist"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.