Superpredator

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A youth who repeatedly commits violent crimes, said to be a result of being raised without morals.

    "In 1996 [DiIulio] authored an incendiary warning of a "rising tide of juvenile superpredators" [and in the National Review] "[a]ll that's left of the black community in […] urban America is deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults[.]""

  2. 2
    A predator that eats other predators.

Synonyms

All synonyms
hyperpredator

Example

More examples

"In 1996 [DiIulio] authored an incendiary warning of a "rising tide of juvenile superpredators" [and in the National Review] "[a]ll that's left of the black community in […] urban America is deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults[.]""

Etymology

From super- + predator. Sociology sense coined by American political scientist John DiIulio in 1995.

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