Word.ws English Dictionary

badman

badman noun: a violence-prone man who has had run-ins with the law; especially one from the Old West days of U.S. history.

Noun

badman (plural badmen)

  1. (US, historical) A violence-prone man who has had run-ins with the law; especially one from the Old West days of U.S. history.
    • Billy the Kid was a badman.
  2. (Jamaica) A gangster.

Proper noun capitalized: Badman

Badman (plural Badmans)

  1. A surname transferred from the nickname.

Forms of badman

Noun
pluralbadmen
Proper noun
pluralBadmans

Origin of badman

From bad + man.

English occupational surname for the servant of someone called Badd or Batt, but possibly, in some cases, a nickname for a reprobate, from bad + man.

Questions about badman

What does badman mean?
Badman means a violence-prone man who has had run-ins with the law; especially one from the Old West days of U.S. history.
What part of speech is badman?
Badman can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of badman?
The plural of badman is badmen.

Words near badman in the dictionary

  1. badly packed kebab
  2. badly packed kebabs
  3. badly-off
  4. badmaash
  5. badmaashes
  6. badman
  7. Badmans
  8. badmash
  9. badmashes
  10. badmen
  11. badmin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: badman (page history and authors); Badman (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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Cite this entry: “badman.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/badman. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.