Wasted

How to spell wasted

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce wasted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wasted mean?

1. adjectiveUsed up carelessly or to no good purpose; squandered.

Wasted in a sentence

• The meeting felt like wasted time once the agenda fell apart.

• All that wasted food in the bin made her rethink the weekly shop.

Where does wasted come from?

Language of origin: French

This word is the past form of 'waste', which English took from the Old North French 'waster', meaning 'to ruin, devastate, or squander'. That French verb traces back to the Latin 'vastare', 'to lay waste or make empty', built on the adjective 'vastus', meaning 'empty, desolate, or immense'; the same 'vastus' also gives us the words 'vast' and 'devastate'. The earliest English uses, around the 1200s, leaned on the harsher sense of laying land to ruin, before the gentler everyday meaning of using something up carelessly took hold. The slang sense of being heavily intoxicated grew in the twentieth century from the idea of a person being ruined or knocked flat. The spelling trap is mild but real: the silent 'e' of 'waste' is dropped before '-ed', so it is 'wasted' with a single 's', never 'wastted' or 'waisted'.

How the word is built

• wast- (from waste: to consume, squander)
• -ed (past tense / adjective suffix)