Garbage

How to spell garbage

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce garbage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does garbage mean?

1. nounWaste material or refuse that is thrown away; things of no value.

Garbage in a sentence

• The bins overflowed because nobody had taken out the garbage all week.

• He dismissed the report as complete garbage and refused to read further.

Where does garbage come from?

Language of origin: French

Garbage entered English in the fifteenth century, when it referred specifically to the offal of a fowl: the giblets, entrails, and other parts removed before cooking. It seems to have come through Anglo-Norman French, the variety of French spoken in England after the Norman Conquest, though the ultimate root is uncertain and several proposals compete. One line connects it to Old French 'garbe', a bundle or sheaf, with the '-age' ending that English borrowed to form mass nouns like 'baggage' and 'luggage'. Over the centuries the meaning broadened from kitchen scraps to any worthless or discarded matter, and by the modern era it became the everyday word for rubbish, especially in North American usage. The persistent spelling trap is the soft 'g' ending written '-age', not '-idge', and the unstressed middle vowel that the ear barely registers.

How the word is built

• garb- (offal, refuse)
• -age (noun suffix denoting a collective mass or result)