Word.ws English Dictionary

bent copper

bent copper noun: a corrupt police officer.

Noun

bent copper (plural bent coppers)

  1. (UK, informal) A corrupt police officer.
    • Onay remembered that he had placed 40 kilos at the bottom of his wardrobe. That meant approximately three and a half kilos had disappeared during the police raid. Bulent kept quiet but the officers eventually found out and a bent copper was later blamed for the alleged theft.2007, Graham Johnson, Druglord, Mainstream Publishing, →ISBN
    • Anticorruption is a double-edged sword. We need to find just enough bent coppers to avoid accusations of a cover-up, but not so many that the public starts to wonder if the police can be trusted.2016 April 28, “Getting to the Truth”, in Line of Duty, season 3, episode 6, spoken by Gill Biggeloe (Polly Walker), archived from the original on 17 May 2021

Forms of bent copper

pluralbent coppers

Origin of bent copper

From bent (“not straight, corrupt, dishonest”) + copper (“policeman”), a variant of cop. It could also be a pun taken from a bent copper coin.

Questions about bent copper

What does bent copper mean?
Bent copper means a corrupt police officer.
What part of speech is bent copper?
Bent copper is a noun.
What is the plural of bent copper?
The plural of bent copper is bent coppers.

Words near bent copper in the dictionary

  1. bent as a butcher's hook
  2. bent as a nine-bob note
  3. bent as a two bob
  4. bent car
  5. bent cars
  6. bent copper
  7. bent coppers
  8. Bent County
  9. bent down
  10. bent edge
  11. bent fork

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bent copper (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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