Trash

How to spell trash

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce trash

What does trash mean?

1. nounDiscarded material or household waste; worthless refuse.
2. verbTo wreck or destroy something, or to criticise it harshly.

Trash in a sentence

• noun

  The bins were overflowing with trash after the party.

• verb

  The tenants threatened to trash the flat before leaving.

• noun

  He carried the bag of trash out to the kerb each morning.

• verb

  Critics were quick to trash the company's new product.

Where does trash come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The origins of trash are not entirely certain, which is why dictionaries usually flag it as obscure. It surfaces in English around the 1500s meaning broken twigs, snapped-off branches, and similar worthless plant debris, and many scholars connect it to a Scandinavian source: compare the Old Norse word 'tros', meaning fallen leaves and small sticks, and related dialect forms in Norwegian and Swedish for rubbish or brushwood. From that literal sense of woody scraps the meaning broadened to cover any worthless refuse, and later still it came to describe worthless people or shoddy work. In American English it settled in as the everyday term for household waste, while British English more often reserves 'rubbish'. The verb sense, to wreck something or to criticise it harshly, is a much more recent twentieth-century development. Because the word is short and phonetically regular, the spelling causes very few problems.

How the word is built

• trash (single root word, no affixes)