Rubbish

How to spell rubbish

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rubbish

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rubbish mean?

1. nounWaste material or refuse that is thrown away as worthless.
2. adjectiveInformal British term meaning of very poor quality or worthless.
3. interjectionUsed to dismiss a statement as nonsense or untrue.

Rubbish in a sentence

• noun

  The council collects the rubbish from our street every Thursday.

• adjective

  The film was utterly rubbish and we left halfway through.

• interjection

  She dismissed the gossip as complete rubbish.

• noun

  He stuffed the wrapping paper and packaging into a rubbish bag.

• adjective

  My phone signal is rubbish in the basement office.

• interjection

  The claims about the product were dismissed as marketing rubbish.

Where does rubbish come from?

Language of origin: French

Rubbish came into English in the late Middle Ages from Anglo-Norman French, where forms such as 'rubous' and 'robows' described broken stone, debris, and the waste left from demolishing buildings. That family of words is closely tied to 'rubble', the loose fragments of brick and stone, and the two words share the same murky French ancestry. The exact older root is uncertain, which is part of why the spelling wandered so much in early records, appearing as 'robys', 'robows', and 'rubbysshe' before settling down. Over time the meaning broadened from builders' debris to household waste and any worthless matter, and by the modern era British English also pressed it into service as an informal adjective for anything of poor quality and even as a verb meaning to criticise harshly. The doubled b and the -ish ending are the spelling traps, both inherited from those unsettled medieval forms rather than from any clear single root.

How the word is built

• rub(b)- (from Anglo-Norman rubous, akin to rubble: broken stone)
• -ish (noun ending)