Word.ws English Dictionary

bad news bears

bad news bears proverb: said of someone or something that will bring disaster or bad fortune to one.

Proverb

bad news bears

  1. (US, capitalized, idiomatic, sometimes) Said of someone or something that will bring disaster or bad fortune to one.
    • I could tell by looking at him that he was bad news bears, so I avoided him for the rest of the school year.
    • When the actors admitted to not having seen the movie and even predicted it wouldn't be critically well-received, we knew it was going to be bad. And then we knew it was really bad news bears when its own director tweeted this.2015 August 14, Kristen Yoonsoo Kim, “This On-Set Fight Between Miles Teller and Josh Trank Is Probably More Exciting Than 'Fantastic Four'”, in Complex, retrieved 25 Nov 2015

Origin of bad news bears

Presumably a reference to the 1976 sports comedy film The Bad News Bears.

Questions about bad news bears

What does bad news bears mean?
Bad news bears means said of someone or something that will bring disaster or bad fortune to one.
What part of speech is bad news bears?
Bad news bears is a proverb.

Words near bad news bears in the dictionary

  1. bad mood
  2. bad moods
  3. bad name
  4. bad names
  5. bad news
  6. bad news bears
  7. bad news travels fast
  8. Bad Oeynhausen
  9. bad off
  10. bad old days
  11. bad part of town

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bad news bears (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.

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