a man who acts with deliberate disregard for another's feelings or rights
"'You low cad! You ought to be ducked in the horsepond, you rotter!'" James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922
"Why are we so wild for [Mad Men's Don] Draper? By any measure, the character's a cad. He constantly cheats on his wife. He skips town for weeks and won't write or call. He doesn't talk much, and anesthetizes any feelings with copious amounts of booze." Katie Baker, TheDailyBeast.com, August 17, 2009
About the Word:
One of the few gender-specific terms on this list, cad is a shortening of caddie, a Scottish term for one who waits around for odd jobs. (This sense of the term eventually developed into the golfing sense of caddie.) These days, cad is commonly linked to romantic misbehavior.