Rotten
adj, adv, slang ·Very common ·Middle school level
Definitions
- 1 Of perishable items, overridden with bacteria and other infectious agents.
"If you leave a bin unattended for a few weeks, the rubbish inside will turn rotten."
- 2 In a state of decay.
"The floors were damaged and the walls were rotten."
- 3 Cruel, mean or immoral.
"That man is a rotten father."
- 4 Bad or terrible.
"Why is the weather always rotten in this city?"
- 5 Of stone or rock, crumbling or friable; in a loose or disintegrated state.
"The quartz specimens were sometimes blue, hard-looking stone, or rotten quartz largely impregnated with iron, in both cases carrying bright glittering nodules of gold."
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- 6 Very drunk, intoxicated. Australia, Ireland, UK, slang
- 1 having decayed or disintegrated; usually implies foulness wordnet
- 2 very bad wordnet
- 3 damaged by decay; hence unsound and useless wordnet
- 1 To an extreme degree.
"That kid is spoilt rotten."
Example
More examples"I bought it thinking it was cheap, but it was rotten, so I ended up losing out."
Etymology
From Middle English roten, from Old Norse rotinn (“decayed, rotten”), past participle of an unrecorded verb related to Old Norse rotna (“to rot”) and Old English rotian (“to rot”), ultimately from Proto-Germanic *rutāną (“to rot”). See rot. By surface analysis, rot + -en (past participle).
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.