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
The stench of rotten eggs and burning debris fills the air in Boxtown, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Memphis.
From Barron's ● Aug. 11, 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
The bag filled rapidly with icy water, and in the wet darkness that stank of rotten cabbages and leaves, Anya and Ivan struggled to find a way out.
From Anya and the Dragon by Sofiya Pasternack
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
Why, they're rottener than nine-tenths of the blokes that follow this show—every mother's son of 'em.
From The Rose in the Ring by George Barr McCutcheon
"We should feel rottener beasts," said Frances, "if we stood in your way."
From The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair
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
“It was the rottenest clinch they ever had in a movie,” Ms. Channing says after describing their awkward practice session.
From New York Times ● Feb. 3, 2012
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
Her name is Sally Jackson and she’s the best person in the world, which just proves my theory that the best people have the rottenest luck.
From "The Lightning Thief" by Rick Riordan
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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