devil's advocate

1. 1.

   someone who takes the worse side just for the sake of argument

   Broaderdebater

Questions about devil's advocate

What does devil's advocate mean?

devil's advocate means "someone who takes the worse side just for the sake of argument".

Is devil's advocate a common word?

devil's advocate is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.