culprit Definition

culprit
noun

1. Someone guilty of a misdeed or offence.

Thesaurus: criminal, offender, miscreant, felon, delinquent, lawbreaker, transgressor, malefactor, perpetrator, rascal.
2. law.
Someone accused of a crime.

Etymology: 17c: from the fusion of French culpable guilty + prest ready, as used in culpable: prest d'averrer notre bille, meaning ‘guilty: ready to prove our charge', the reply of the clerk of the court to a prisoner's plea of not guilty, which at a later time, after the disuse of law French, was wrongly attributed to the prisoner.