A person who takes the law into their own hands to punish crime, without official legal authority.
From Spanish 'vigilante' meaning 'watchman' or 'alert person,' from Latin 'vigilans' (awake, watchful). It originally meant a night watchman, then evolved to mean someone taking unauthorized justice.
Vigilante groups became famous in the American Old West (like the San Francisco Vigilance Committee in 1851), but the phenomenon shows up whenever people feel the official justice system has failed them—it's a pattern repeated across cultures.
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