wicked
/ˈwɪk.ɪd/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.99 in modern English
16
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
noun
Wicked (evil) people collectively.
verb
simple past and past participle of wick
Example Sentences
- "Genuine cowards follow wicked people and cannot reliably sustain any virtue."
- "The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bolde as a lyon."
- "“Yes,” replied she; “and the saddest part of it all is that she is not marrying the man she loves. Oh, it is terrible. Marrying from a sense of duty! I think it is perfectly wicked, and I told her so.”"
- "‘[…] I remember a lady coming to inspect St. Mary's Home where I was brought up and seeing us all in our lovely Elizabethan uniforms we were so proud of, and bursting into tears all over us because “it was wicked to dress us like charity children”.[…]’."
- "What a wicked game to play, to make me feel this way / What a wicked thing to do, to let me dream of you / What a wicked thing to say, you never felt this way"
- "wicked wind"
Etymology
From Middle English wicked, wikked, an alteration of Middle English wicke, wikke (“morally perverse, evil, wicked”). Of uncertain origin. Possibly from an adjectival use of Old English wiċċa (“wizard, sorcerer”), from Proto-West Germanic *wikkō (“necromancer, sorcerer”), though the phonology makes this theory difficult to explain. Alternatively, perhaps related to English wicker, Old Norse víkja (“to bend to, yield, turn, move”), Swedish vika (“to bend, fold, give way to”), English weak. The "excellent, awesome" sense is an ameliorative semantic shift from the original sense of "evil, mischievous". Compare similar semantic development in terrific and sick.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈwɪk.ɪd/
- British English: /ˈwɪk.ɪd/
Usage
Inflected Forms
wickeder (comparative)
more wicked (comparative)
wickedest (superlative)
most wicked (superlative)
the wicked (canonical, plural)