Trashed

How to spell trashed

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce trashed

What does trashed mean?

1. verbDamaged, wrecked, or ruined something badly, or threw it away as rubbish.
2. adjectiveExtremely drunk or intoxicated (informal slang).

Trashed in a sentence

• verb

  The storm trashed the entire vegetable garden overnight.

• adjective

  By the end of the wedding reception he was completely trashed.

• verb

  The tenants trashed the flat before they moved out.

• adjective

  They got trashed at the office party and regretted it the next morning.

Where does trashed come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The base word trash first appears in late Middle English around the 1500s, where it meant broken twigs, hedge cuttings, or other worthless leftover scraps, and its origin is genuinely uncertain. Many scholars connect it to a Scandinavian source, comparing it with dialectal Norwegian trask meaning lumber or rubbish and Old Norse words for fallen leaves and debris, though the trail is not fully secure. From the literal sense of broken scraps the meaning broadened to anything regarded as worthless, and by extension to nonsense or low-quality writing and people. The verb to trash, meaning to throw away as rubbish or to wreck and ruin something, grew naturally out of the noun, and trashed is simply its past tense and past participle with the regular -ed ending. The modern slang sense of trashed for heavily intoxicated borrows the same image of something wrecked and ruined, this time applied to a person. Because the word already ends in the sh sound, writers sometimes hesitate over the final consonant, but the -ed spelling stays regular even though it is pronounced as a plain t.

How the word is built

• trash (worthless rubbish, broken bits)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)