Rotten

How to spell rotten

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rotten

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rotten mean?

1. adjectiveDecayed, decomposed, or spoiled, especially of food, wood, or organic matter.
2. adjectiveInformally, very unpleasant, of poor quality, or thoroughly unfair.

Rotten in a sentence

• The rotten apples at the bottom of the basket had to be thrown out.

• She had a rotten day at the office and came home exhausted.

• The surveyor found rotten timber under the kitchen floor.

• Losing the deposit over a clerical error felt like a rotten piece of luck.

Where does rotten come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Rotten came into English from Old Norse, where rotinn was the past participle of a verb meaning 'to decay' or 'to putrefy', so it literally described something that had gone bad. Norse settlers brought the word to England during the Viking age, and it took root alongside the native English verb 'rot', with which it shares a deep Germanic ancestry tied to ideas of softening and breaking down. By the 1200s rotten was firmly established to describe spoiled food, decayed wood, and anything in a state of decay. The sense soon broadened figuratively to mean morally corrupt or thoroughly bad, as in a 'rotten' deal or a 'rotten' mood. The spelling keeps the doubled t, which marks the short vowel before the -en ending, a small detail worth remembering when writing it.

How the word is built

• rot (decay)
• -en (adjective suffix from Old Norse past participle)