sociopath

A sociopath is a person with a mental illness that manifests in extremely antisocial behavior and the inability to distinguish right from wrong. You're probably right to be afraid of asociopath.

  • Pronunciation: /'sosɪopæθ/
  • English description: someone with a sociopathic personality; a person with an antisocial personality disorder (`psychopath' was once widely used but has now been superseded by `sociopath')
  • Synonyms: psychopath
  • Chinese Translation:  反社会的人(fan3 she4 hui4 de ren2)
  • Spanish Translation: el sociópata
  • ORIGIN: Pathology means illness, and so socio- pathology means social illness. If someone is a sociopath, that means that they have a social sickness––they lack the ability to be social. Many movies and TV crime shows feature plots involving sociopaths, but hopefully the TV is the only place you ever encounter sociopaths.

EXAMPLE SENTENCE:

  • Hardy infuses him with enough lonely, belligerent conviction that he comes across not just as a self-justifying coward, but a true sociopath.
  • The problem isn’t with passengers, though the evidence demonstrates that many passengers are little better than sociopaths acting only for their own good.

*New word description, story and part of "EXAMPLE SENTENCE" are cited in Vocabulary.com