Villain comes from the Anglo-French and Old French vilain, which itself descends from the Late Latin word villanus, meaning farmhand, in the sense of someone who is bound to the soil of a villa, which is to say, worked on the equivalent of a plantation in Late Antiquity, in Italy or Gaul. The same etymology produced villein. It referred to a person of less than knightly status and so came to mean a person who was not chivalrous. As a result of many unchivalrous acts, such as treachery or rape, being considered villainous in the modern sense of the word, it became used as a term of abuse and eventually took on its modern meaning. The Germanic word churl, originally meaning a non-servile peasant and denoting the lowest rank of freemen in Saxon society, had gone through a similar degradation, as did the word oor which originally meant farmer.
A villain is an evil character in a story, whether a historical narrative or, especially, a work of fiction. The villain usually is the antagonist , the character who tends to have a negative effect on other characters. A female villain is occasionally called a villainess . Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines villain as a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel; or a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot. (source : wikipedia)
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