From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishpsychopathpsy‧cho‧path /ˈsaɪkəpæθ/ noun [countable] MPVIOLENTsomeone who has a serious and permanent mental illness that makes them behave in a violent or criminal way → sociopath —psychopathic /ˌsaɪkəˈpæθɪk◂/ adjective a psychopathic personality —psychopathically /-kli/ adverb
Examples from the Corpus
psychopath• Police described the killer as a psychopath.• He let some one into that church, a thief, another derelict, a psychopath, and that person killed him.• The main character in the movie is Dr Hannibal Lector, who displays all the characteristics of a psychopath.• Only a psychopath would include children in the instruction.• Dr Green said that, in his opinion, Perry was a dangerous psychopath who might kill again.• On several occasions she has been hurried through them by impatient attorneys and by irate psychopaths on their way to methadone-maintenance clinics.• The danger of psychopaths who freely cross state borders to poison our medicines or to assassinate our leaders is well known.• The danger of other psychopaths who, now and then, unhappily become our leaders has been recognized as well.• He was convinced decades ago that psychopaths were the coming thing and soon would pass for normal.• In a medical book, the psychopath is cold-blooded, premeditated, uncaring, manipulative.• The psychopath, even so, falls far short of the ideal of philosophical egoism.Origin psychopath (1800-1900) Greek psych- ( → PSYCH-) + pathos “suffering” 