Screwed
adj, verb, slang ·1 syllable ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 simple past and past participle of screw form-of, participle, past
"He screwed the boards together tightly."
- 1 Beset with unfortunate circumstances that seem difficult or impossible to overcome; in imminent danger. mildly, slang, vulgar
"They found out about our betrayal, so now we're screwed."
- 2 Intoxicated. British, dated, slang
""[…] Did you know that my husband came home intoxicated?" Mrs. Brown laughed. "Oh, not so bad as that, surely! Only a little 'screwed.' George was 'quisby,' too. But then its Christmas, you know.""
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"The driver really screwed up the team when he drove them to the wrong playing field in a different town."
Etymology
From screw + -ed. * The modern sense of screwed originates in the mid-1600s with a sense of to screw as a means of "exerting pressure or coercion", probably in reference to instruments of torture (e.g. thumbscrews). It quickly gained a wider general sense of "in a bind; in unfortunate inescapable circumstances". When the verb screw gained a sexual connotation in the early 1700s, it joined the long-lasting association of sexual imagery as a metaphor for domination, leading to screwed gaining synonyms like fucked and shagged. On a more general note, this is a prime example of the frequent tendency for verb participles to evolve into participial adjectives. * The sense meaning "intoxicated" is from the early 1800s, and is associated with the term screwy, and the idiom to have a screw loose.
Related phrases
More for "screwed"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.