Waste

How to spell waste

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce waste

What does waste mean?

1. verbTo use something carelessly or to no useful purpose, so that its value is lost.
2. nounMaterial that is no longer wanted or usable and is thrown away.
3. adjectiveDescribing land that is barren, uncultivated, or left unused.

Waste in a sentence

• verb

  Leaving the lights on overnight will waste a great deal of electricity.

• noun

  The council collects garden waste every other Tuesday.

• adjective

  The developers cleared a stretch of waste ground behind the station.

• verb

  Do not waste your time arguing over a refund that small.

• noun

  The factory was fined for dumping toxic waste into the river.

• adjective

  Beyond the farm lay miles of dry, waste land where nothing grew.

Where does waste come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Waste comes from the Latin vastus, which meant 'empty', 'unoccupied', or 'desolate', and which also gave English the words 'vast' and 'devastate'. The Latin term passed into the Old Northern French form wast, and English borrowed it in the early 1200s, first describing barren or uncultivated land. From the idea of land lying empty and unproductive grew the sense of squandering something so that it produces no benefit, and later the sense of the rubbish or by-products that are thrown away. The spelling keeps the silent final 'e' that lengthens the vowel, and the whole word sounds exactly like 'waist', the part of the body, which is its main spelling trap. Remembering the link to 'vast' and 'devastate' can help fix the 'wast-' stem in the mind.

How the word is built

• wast- (from Latin vastus: empty, desolate)
• -e

Words that sound like waste

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• waist: The narrow part of the human body between the ribs and the hips, or the corresponding part of a garment.