Addled
adj, verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 simple past and past participle of addle form-of, participle, past
- 1 Bad, rotten; inviable, containing a dead embryo.
"He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been—in that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they had not been whistled away—by the fervour of this reproach."
- 2 Confused; mixed up. figuratively
"coke-addled"
- 3 Morbid, corrupt, putrid, or barren. obsolete
- 1 confused and vague; used especially of thinking wordnet
- 2 (of eggs) no longer edible wordnet
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"I'm old, but my brain is not that addled yet."
Etymology
From Middle English addledd, adyld, equivalent to addle (“urine, liquid filth”) + -ed. Addle derives from Old English adel, adela (“mud, mire, liquid manure”), cognate with Old Swedish adel (“urine”), Middle Low German adel, Dutch aal (“manure”). Used in noun phrase addle egg (mid-13c.) “egg that does not hatch, rotten egg”, lit. “urine egg”, a calque of Latin ovum urinum, which is itself an erroneous calque of Ancient Greek οὔριον ᾠόν (oúrion ōión, “putrid egg”, literally “wind egg”), from οὔριος (oúrios, “of the wind”), from οὖρος (oûros, “fair wind”) (confused by Roman writers with οὔριος (oúrios, “of urine”), from οὖρον (oûron, “urine”)). Because of this usage, the noun in English was taken as an adjective from c. 1600, meaning “putrid”.
Related phrases
More for "addled"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.