addled
/ˈæ.dəld/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 2.56 in modern English
9
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
simple past and past participle of addle
Example Sentences
- "He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been—in that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they had not been whistled away—by the fervour of this reproach."
- "I haven’t a bit o’ patience with you—sitting on an addled egg for ever, as if there was never a fresh un in the world."
- "We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice-peg, / We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yelk of an addled egg,"
- "coke-addled"
- "crack-addled"
- "But she counted and counted till she got that addled she’d start to count in the basket for a spoon sometimes; […]."
Etymology
From Middle English addled, adyld, equivalent to addle (“urine, liquid filth”) + -ed. Addle derives from Old English adel, adela (“mud, mire, liquid manure”), cognate with Old Swedish adel (“urine”), Middle Low German adel, Dutch aal (“manure”). Used in noun phrase addle egg (mid-13c.) “egg that does not hatch, rotten egg”, lit. “urine egg”, a calque of Latin ovum urinum, which is itself an erroneous calque of Ancient Greek οὔριον ᾠόν (oúrion ōión, “putrid egg”, literally “wind egg”), from οὔριος (oúrios, “of the wind”), from οὖρος (oûros, “fair wind”) (confused by Roman writers with οὔριος (oúrios, “of urine”), from οὖρον (oûron, “urine”)). Because of this usage, the noun in English was taken as an adjective from c. 1600, meaning “putrid”.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Usage
Inflected Forms
more addled (comparative)
most addled (superlative)