rotten
Example Sentences
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Residents of Savannah, now a tourist mecca known for its moss-draped squares and antebellum architecture, tolerated the river pollution and dismissed the mill’s rotten odor as “the smell of money.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 28, 2026
"Apple built its reputation by paying close attention to the smallest details. This lawsuit does the opposite," OpenAI's lawyers say in their filing, which continues to describe Apple's complaint as "rotten to its core."
From Barron's ● Aug. 7, 2026
The meat has been described as tasting like a cross between kipper and steak or "salty goose" and, less flatteringly, as "rotten leather and fishy beef", external.
From BBC ● Aug. 3, 2026
Moldy, bruised and rotten fruits and vegetables should also be avoided.
From Salon ● Jul. 20, 2026
He knew that the Hidden People live inside rocks and rivers, just as the clans live in shelters, and that they seem beautiful until they turn their backs, which are hollow as rotten trees.
From "Wolf Brother" by Michelle Paver
This is an illness, a mania, but seems more like something a writer might envy, which feels even rottener than envy usually does, because Gould was a toothless madman who slept in the street.
From The New Yorker ● Jul. 27, 2015
Back in England, he yanked some young offenders out of the regular prisons, moved them away from the older, rottener apples to a Kentish village called Borstal.
From Time Magazine Archive
The wooden bridge is more askew, rottener than I remember.
From "Cat's Eye" by Margaret Atwood
If there is one thing rottener than another in a pretty blighted world, one thing which gives a fellow the pip and reduces him to the condition of an absolute onion, it is hopeless love.
From The Adventures of Sally by P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse
In those days The Sphere specialized on scandals; the rottener, the better; stuff that it wouldn't touch to-day.
From Success A Novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams
Oliver’s efforts to save Manny require the kind of ruthless cunning he learned earlier from the rottenest of rotten cops.
From Washington Post ● Feb. 2, 2018
“He is very, very dead. The rottenest of the rotten. . . . But hey, we have his plays, so voilà.”
From The New Yorker ● Aug. 12, 2014
“The rottenest piece of land there is,” said Mick Elbert, a local car dealer who served on the golf association board.
From New York Times ● Dec. 31, 2011
Made from the juiciest of rotten apples, the rottenest of juicy maggots, and bits of skin and rags that fell into the barrel.
From The Guardian ● Jul. 22, 2010
“I got three of them. The rottenest eggs in Sassafras Springs.”
From "The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs" by Betty G. Birney
Vocabulary lists containing rotten
Oh, No! Synonyms for "Bad"
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List 3
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So Bad: Synonyms for "Awful"
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