Wicked
adj, adv, verb, slang ·Very common ·Middle school level
Definitions
- 1 simple past and past participle of wick form-of, participle, past
- 1 Evil or mischievous by nature; morally reprehensible.
"Genuine cowards follow wicked people and cannot reliably sustain any virtue."
- 2 Having a wick. not-comparable
"a two-wicked lamp"
- 3 Active; brisk. UK, dialectal, obsolete
- 4 Harsh; severe.
"wicked wind"
- 5 Infested with maggots. British, Yorkshire, dialectal
Show 2 more definitions
- 6 Excellent; awesome; masterful. slang
"That was a wicked guitar solo, bro!"
- 7 Alternative form of wick, as applying to inanimate objects only. alt-of, alternative
- 1 intensely or extremely bad or unpleasant in degree or quality wordnet
- 2 highly offensive; arousing aversion or disgust wordnet
- 3 having committed unrighteous acts wordnet
- 4 naughtily or annoyingly playful wordnet
- 5 morally bad in principle or practice wordnet
- 1 To a superlative extent, very, extremely Boston, Scotland, archaic, especially, not-comparable, slang
"I didn't really wanna go see On Golden Pond with the fam, but my mom made me go, and I must say that in retrospect it was a wicked expressive film, with a lot of significant meaning."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"The wicked witch cast an evil spell on the man and turned him into an insect."
Etymology
From Middle English wicked, wikked, an alteration of Middle English wicke, wikke (“morally perverse, evil, wicked”). Of uncertain origin. Possibly from an adjectival use of Old English wiċċa (“wizard, sorcerer”), from Proto-West Germanic *wikkō (“necromancer, sorcerer”), though the phonology makes this theory difficult to explain. Alternatively, perhaps related to English wicker, Old Norse víkja (“to bend to, yield, turn, move”), Swedish vika (“to bend, fold, give way to”), English weak. The "excellent, awesome" sense is an ameliorative semantic shift from the original sense of "evil, mischievous". Compare similar semantic development in terrific and sick.
See wick.
Related phrases
More for "wicked"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.