Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use malicious in a sentence

40 example sentences · adjective

Malicious means intending to do harm; characterized by spite and malice. Example: “He was sent off for a malicious tackle on Jones.”

Examples of malicious by meaning

adjectiveIntending to do harm; characterized by spite and malice.

  • He was sent off for a malicious tackle on Jones.
  • They gathered soberly in the farthest recess of the ward and gossiped about him in malicious, offended undertones, rebelling against his presence as a ghastly imposition and resenting him malevolently for the nauseating truth of which he was bright reminder.1961 November 10, Joseph Heller, “The Soldier in White”, in Catch-22 […], New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, →OCLC, page 169

More sentences with malicious

  • Accusations of abuse were pure extortive calumny in a malicious bid to make money.From the entry calumny
  • Client-side validation of data is dangerous because the client might be malicious.From the entry client-side
  • The malicious boss thought that all of his employees were underworked.From the entry underworked
  • I wouldn't put it past him to spread malicious gossip about you.From the entry put it past
  • A man may be apparently friendly, yet malicious in heart.From the entry apparently
  • A nondictionary password is harder for malicious hackers to guess.From the entry nondictionary
  • Demin warned that more companies could face malicious software capable of cryptomining.2017 December 16, Hyacinth Mascarenhas, “Russian pipeline giant Transneft's computers hit with malware that covertly mined…. From the entry cryptomining
  • “Gotcha!” He flung himself on top of the malicious pod, squashing it flat.2014 May 6, Anne Cameron, “A Christmas Podding”, in The Storm Tower Thief (The Lightning Catcher; 2), New York, N.Y.: Greenwillow Books…. From the entry flumpf
  • This is a malicious tweet whose sole purpose is to wake up my sister.2009 April 11, @courtleighbooks, Twitter, archived from the original on 18 Jul 2024. From the entry whevs
  • A malicious person could reinstate this domain with malicious code on it.2006, Paul Wouters, Ken Bantoft, Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks with Openswan. From the entry squat
  • In addition to out-of-spec traffic, malicious packets can contain payloads that cause a system to crash.2003, Jack Koziol, Intrusion Detection with Snort, Indianapolis, IN: Sams Publishing, →ISBN, page 15. From the entry dos
  • She lies, steals and sleeps around, gleefully spreading malicious rumours wherever she goes.1999 January 14, Geoffrey Macnab, “Arts: Strong, conniving women: the final frontier”, in The Independent, UK, retrieved 12 May 2014. From the entry wicked tongue
  • Oh nonsense: that was all bunko," he replied, developing his malicious grin.1934, Ernest Bramah, The Bravo of London. From the entry bunko
  • The malicious elves did not confine their attacks to human beings; references to elf-shot cattle are numerous.1922, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, The Old English Herbals, page 16. From the entry elf-shot
  • "Slopsquatting," where attackers create malicious software packages using names AI models have already hallucinated into existence, is already a thing.2026 January 22, Jonny Evans, “Jamf has a warning for macOS vibe coders”, in Computerworld, via EBSCOhost, →ISSN. From the entry slopsquatting
  • He was paranoid about state actors stealing OpenAI’s secrets and building their own powerful AI models for malicious purposes.2025, Karen Hao, Empire of AI, New York City: Penguin Press, →ISBN. From the entry air-gapped
  • In reality though, the circumstances for the scenario of blocking or 'depreferencing' a malicious Web page are different.2015 August, Huw Fryer, Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon, Tim Chown, “Malicious web pages: What if hosting providers could actually do…. From the entry depreference
  • Ballard sue J.G Ballard for, on grounds of malicious libel?2013, John Sutherland, Curiosities of Literature: A Feast for Book Lovers, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., →ISBN. From the entry Sue, Grabbit and Runne
  • There were eudaimons, beneficial spirits, and kakodaimons, malicious spirits.2013, Bill Meacham, “Posing the Question”, in How To Be An Excellent Human: Mysticism, Evolutionary Psychology and the Good Life, Austin…. From the entry eudaimon
  • Cyberattacks almost inevitably involve an element of deception, such as tricking a user to click on a malicious link.2012 June 5, Patrick Lin, Neil Rowe, Fritz Allhoff, “Is It Possible to Wage a Just Cyberwar?”, in The Atlantic. From the entry perfidy
  • He lives somewhat aloof, and not utterly malicious against you.'2011, Helen Castor, Blood and Roses. From the entry friendlihood
  • People would spread malicious tales and calumnies about me.2011, Paul Theroux, A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta, →ISBN. From the entry scandalmongery
  • Only a small group of websites, well off the beaten path of most surfers, contain the malicious code.2005 December 30, “Microsoft Confirms Windows Flaw”, in Time. From the entry off the beaten path
  • Moderate assaultives included persons convicted of wounding with intent to cause serious bodily harm, malicious or unlawful wounding, and assault.1980, Curt R. Bartol, chapter 8, in Criminal Behavior: A Psychosocial Approach,, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, page 223. From the entry assaultive
  • Ellis saw them coming, a row of yellow, malicious faces—epicene faces, horribly smooth and young, grinning at him with deliberate insolence.1934 October, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], Burmese Days, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, →OCLC…. From the entry epicene
  • Malicious Fate, too, they felt, would even crown with the grand prix the number they would have chosen.1910, Israel Zangwill, The Grey Wig. From the entry aleatory
  • A malicious actor had intentionally posted the video into various sub-Reddits with different headlines, trying to determine which would spark the fiercest emotional response.2022, Jason Steinhauer, History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past, Springer Nature Switzerland AG…. From the entry sub-reddit
  • None of the VirusTotal anti-virus scanners detected the CySource researchers' Base64 encoded payload added to the metadata of the malicious DjVu file.2022 April 26, Juha Saarinen, "Google's VirusTotal Service Vulnerable for Over Eight Months", iTnews. From the entry djvu
  • Malicious Apps often disguise as normal Apps, the common form is the free version of paid Apps, users often misinstall such malicious Apps.2021, Ding Wang, Weizhi Meng, Jinguang Han, Security and Privacy in New Computing Environments. From the entry misinstall
  • Most parents do not overshare online because they are malicious; they simply have not fully considered the significance of their child’s digital footprint.2020 August 4, Stacey Steinberg, “Why Parents Should Pause Before Oversharing Online”, in The New York Times, →ISSN. From the entry overshare
  • Over the past year, we’ve seen reports of SIM-jacking, a particularly malicious attack hackers are using to assume control of victims’ digital and financial lives.2018 October 17, Emil Hozan, “Everything Your Need to Know About SIM-Jacking”, in Secplicity. From the entry simjacking
  • Do not associate with a person who is malicious, selfish, or unkind As people say, “Who keeps company with the wolf will learn to howl."2015, Yukiko Inoue-Smith, A Jungle Named Academia: Approaches to Self-Development and Growth, →ISBN. From the entry who keeps company with the wolf will learn to howl
  • It was malicious, perhaps, and invites us to qualify dirty play and physical play, but it was a shade of Laimbeer – boys being boys.2012 February 7, Peter Cavanaugh, “Reviewing the Kevin Love face stomp”, in Impose. From the entry coin purse
  • The benefit of packed malware, from a malicious author's point of view, is that it cannot be analyzed until it is properly unpacked.2007, David Harley, AVIEN malware defense guide for the Enterprise, page 408. From the entry unpacker
  • It is intent to deceive or to dabble in malicious mischief that sets a sock puppeteer apart from a legitimate user with multiple accounts.2005 December 21, Shelley Powers, "Yo! Sock Puppets!" on Burningbird.net. From the entry sock puppeteer
  • Commenting on the malicious code added to the “Vue-cli” application, GitHub user “nm17” said a continued expansion of protestware would erode public trust in open-source software.2022 March 17, Brian Krebs, “Pro-Ukraine ‘Protestware’ Pushes Antiwar Ads, Geo-Targeted Malware”, in Krebs on Security. From the entry protestware
  • The frightening part is that, in addition to disrupting normal communications in vehicles, they also enable malicious listening in order to obtain sensitive and valuable data.2022 January 13, Cheng Pengzhou et al., “TCAN-IDS: Intrusion Detection System for Internet of Vehicle Using Temporal Convolutional…. From the entry extra-vehicular
  • By now, he seems less a cartoon character than some contemporary Erlking, the malicious spirit made famous by Goethe (and Schubert) but found originally in a Danish ballad.2018 October 22, Carol Rumens, “Poem of the week: Three Poetesses by Kristín Ómarsdóttir”, in The Guardian, →ISSN. From the entry erlking

Meaning of malicious

  1. adjective Intending to do harm; characterized by spite and malice.

Full definition of malicious

Questions about malicious in a sentence

How do you use malicious in a sentence?
Malicious is used as an adjective. For example: “He was sent off for a malicious tackle on Jones.”
What is a short sentence with malicious?
“People would spread malicious tales and calumnies about me.”
What does malicious mean?
Malicious means intending to do harm; characterized by spite and malice.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: malicious (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this page: “How to use malicious in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/malicious. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.