bad debt

bad debt noun: a debt which cannot be recovered from the debtor, either because the debtor lacks the money to pay or because the debtor cannot be found and/or forced to pay.

Noun

bad debt (countable and uncountable, plural bad debts)

A debt which cannot be recovered from the debtor, either because the debtor lacks the money to pay or because the debtor cannot be found and/or forced to pay.
- The firm’s researchers also went through the public accounts of nearly all the major financial institutions in the world and constructed estimates of how much money they stood to lose from bad debts.2011 July 18, John Cassidy, “Mastering the Machine”, in The New Yorker, →ISSN

bad debt meaning in Tamil, Kannada, Malay and Indonesian

bad debt in Tamil

வாராக் கடன், வாராக்கடன்

bad debt in Kannada

ಕರಡು ಸಾಲ, ಬಾಕಿ, ಹೋಕು, ವಸೂಲಾಗದ ಸಾಲ

bad debt in Malay

unrecoverable debt: hutang lapuk

bad debt in Indonesian

unrecoverable debt: utang buruk

More languagesFewer languages

bad debt in Thai: หนี้สูญ
bad debt in Vietnamese: nợ xấu

Forms of bad debt

plural	bad debts

Questions about bad debt

What does bad debt mean?: Bad debt means a debt which cannot be recovered from the debtor, either because the debtor lacks the money to pay or because the debtor cannot be found and/or forced to pay.
What is bad debt in Tamil?: Bad debt in Tamil is வாராக் கடன், வாராக்கடன். See Bad debt meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is bad debt?: Bad debt is a noun.
What is the plural of bad debt?: The plural of bad debt is bad debts.

Words near bad debt in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: bad debt (page history and authors); bad debt (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); bad debt (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “bad debt.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bad_debt. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.