Word.ws English Dictionary

status offender

status offender noun: one who commits a status offense; especially a juvenile delinquent taken into state care for uncontrollable behavior at home.

Noun

status offender (plural status offenders)

  1. One who commits a status offense; especially a juvenile delinquent taken into state care for uncontrollable behavior at home.
    • The Department concluded that if the State fully complied with the Federal requirement for deinstitutionalization of status offenders it would need substantially more group homes and child caring facilities.1978, Removing Status Offenders from Secure Facilities, United States: General Accounting Office, page 77
    • In reality, many children who become status offenders come from neglectful or dysfunctional homes in which the parents or responsible adult has not cultivated the appropriate adult-child relationship and fundamental respect has broken down.1999, Preston Elrod, R. Scott Ryder, Juvenile Justice: A Social, Historical, and Legal Perspective, page 340

Forms of status offender

pluralstatus offenders

Questions about status offender

What does status offender mean?
Status offender means one who commits a status offense; especially a juvenile delinquent taken into state care for uncontrollable behavior at home.
What part of speech is status offender?
Status offender is a noun.
What is the plural of status offender?
The plural of status offender is status offenders.

Words near status offender in the dictionary

  1. status Indian
  2. status Indians
  3. status line
  4. status lines
  5. status mixtus
  6. status offender
  7. status offenders
  8. status offense
  9. status offenses
  10. status quo
  11. status quo ante

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: status offender (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: “status offender.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/status_offender. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.