villain [ME] In medieval England a villain was a feudal tenant who was entirely subject to a lord or manor—now usually spelled villein. People began to use villain as an insult implying someone was a low-born rustic, and the meaning deteriorated even further to ‘a person guilty of a crime, a criminal’. A bad character in a book was a villain from the 1820s. The word came from French and goes back to Latin villa ‘country house with an estate or farm’, from which villa [E17th] itself and village [LME] also derive.