Bad

How to spell bad

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bad

What does bad mean?

1. adjectiveOf poor quality, unpleasant, harmful, or not as it should be.

Bad in a sentence

• The milk had gone bad after a week in the warm kitchen.

• Heavy traffic and bad weather delayed the entire journey home.

Where does bad come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The origins of 'bad' are surprisingly murky, which is unusual for such a common English word. It appears in Middle English as 'badde', most likely from the Old English 'bæddel', a word that referred to an effeminate or worthless man. That root sense of contemptibility seems to have broadened over the centuries into the wide-ranging modern meaning of 'not good' in quality, behaviour, or condition. It has no clear relatives in the other Germanic languages, which is why scholars cannot trace it with full confidence and treat its exact descent as uncertain. The spelling itself has stayed mercifully simple, three letters with no silent traps, ever since the medieval double-d form lost its extra letter.

How the word is built

• bad (single root, an Old English adjective, no prefix or suffix)