Corrupted

How to spell corrupted

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce corrupted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does corrupted mean?

1. verbPast form of corrupt: to have caused someone or something to become dishonest or morally degraded.
2. adjectiveOf a file or data: damaged so that it can no longer be read or used correctly.

Corrupted in a sentence

• verb

  Years of easy bribes slowly corrupted the planning committee.

• adjective

  The failed download left a corrupted file that would not open.

• verb

  The prosecutor argued that greed had corrupted the entire department.

• adjective

  The technician recovered most of the photos from the corrupted memory card.

Where does corrupted come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past form of 'corrupt', which comes from the Latin corruptus, the past participle of corrumpere, a verb meaning 'to destroy, spoil, or break utterly'. That verb joined the intensive prefix cor- (a form of com-, here meaning 'thoroughly') with rumpere, 'to break', so the literal idea was something broken right through. English took the word in during the 1300s, largely by way of Old French, applying it first to moral and physical decay: bribery rotting an official, or food and air going bad. The same rumpere root gives us 'rupture', 'erupt', and 'interrupt', all of which involve a breaking of some kind. The double 'r' is the usual spelling trap, a leftover from the assimilation of com- to cor- before the 'r' of the root, so it helps to remember the related word 'rupture' sitting inside it.

How the word is built

• cor- (thoroughly, from com-)
• rupt (break, from Latin rumpere)
• -ed (past-tense/adjective suffix)