Meaning & use
culprit
A person or thing responsible for causing a problem, especially a crime or wrongdoing.
See it in a sentence
Detectives quickly identified the culprit behind the string of neighborhood burglaries.
After hours of testing, engineers found the real culprit behind the software crash.
A note on using this word
Culprit is often used loosely for a non-human cause of a problem, such as a bug in code or an ingredient causing an allergic reaction.
Words with a similar meaning
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