Word.ws English Dictionary

social engineer

social engineer noun: one who engages in social engineering.

Noun

social engineer (plural social engineers)

  1. One who engages in social engineering.
    • We need another type of social engineer for the country problem, who will be able to direct the social forces of a whole county and relate them to the best interests of State and county.1911, Edwin Lee Earp, The Social Engineer, Eaton & Mains, page 295
    • [Pretexting] is one of the critical points for many social engineers. Pretexting involves developing the role the social engineer will play for the attack on the company. Will the social engineer be a customer, vendor, tech support, new hire, or something equally realistic and believable?2010, Christopher Hadnagy, Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking, John Wiley, unpaginated page

Verb

social engineer (third-person singular simple present social engineers, present participle social engineering, simple past and past participle social engineered)

  1. (transitive) To achieve or access by means of social engineering.
    • Leon social engineered his way into our corporate intranet.
    • What was also prevalent was a Fabian-type view of socialism that it could be administered, even social engineered into existence.2018, John Astley, The Role of Social Science in the Education of Professional Practitioners, Routledge, →ISBN

Forms of social engineer

Noun
pluralsocial engineers
Verb
third-person singular presentsocial engineers
present participlesocial engineering
past participlesocial engineered
pastsocial engineered

Origin of social engineer

social + engineer.

Questions about social engineer

What does social engineer mean?
Social engineer means one who engages in social engineering.
What part of speech is social engineer?
Social engineer can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of social engineer?
The plural of social engineer is social engineers.

Words near social engineer in the dictionary

  1. social drinker
  2. social drinkers
  3. social dynamics
  4. social eating
  5. social ecology
  6. social engineer
  7. social engineered
  8. social engineering
  9. social engineers
  10. social entrepreneur
  11. social entrepreneurs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: social engineer (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: “social engineer.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/social_engineer. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.