1. A person accused or charged with the commission of a crime.
2. A person who is guilty of a crime. • Culprit may be a running together of cul, shortened from the Latin culpabilis (“guilty”), and prit, from Old French prest (“ready”), two words formerly used to orally plead at the outset of a criminal case.
“When the prisoner hath thus pleaded not guilty, non culpabilis… the clerk of the assise, or clerk of the arraigns, on behalf of the crown replies, that the prisoner is guilty, and that he is ready to prove him so. This is done by two monosyllables in the same spirit of abbreviation, ‘cul. prit.’ which signifies first that the prisoner is guilty, (cul. culpable, or culpabilis) and then that the king is ready to prove him so; prît, praesto sum, or paratus verificare…. How our courts came to express a matter of this importance in so odd and obscure a manner … can hardly be pronounced with certainty. It may perhaps, however, be accounted for by supposing that these were at first short notes, to help the memory of the clerk, and remind him what he was to reply; or else it was the short method of taking down in court, upon the minutes, the replication and averment; ‘cul. prît’: which afterwards the ignorance of succeeding clerks adopted for the very words to be by them spoken. But however it may have arisen, the joining of issue … seems to be clearly the meaning of this obscure expression; which has puzzled our most ingenious etymologists, and is commonly understood as if the clerk of the arraigns, immediately on plea pleaded, had fixed an opprobrious name on the prisoner, by asking him, ‘culprit, how wilt thou be tried?’ ” 4 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 333–34 (1769).
