The Only Use of
culprit
in
To Kill a Mockingbird
- Once the town was terrorized by a series of morbid nocturnal events: people's chickens and household pets were found mutilated; although the culprit was Crazy Addie, who eventually drowned himself in Barker's Eddy, people still looked at the Radley Place, unwilling to discard their initial suspicions.
p. 9.8culprit = person responsible for wrongdoing
Definitions:
-
(1)
(culprit) someone responsible for a wrongdoing -- especially a criminal; or something that caused a problem
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
More rarely culprit can reference anything identified as the cause of a problem -- such as a defective part that broke a machine.