rotten
Example Sentences
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The air quality management district said it has received more than 4,900 odor complaints related to the Lineage warehouse “reporting persistent rotten, sour and garbage-like odors.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 30, 2026
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
The water smelled of rotten fish—an odor she had always associated with Crocodile Guts.
From "A Girl Named Disaster" by Nancy Farmer
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
Oh, dash these explanations, George!" he cried; "You only make things look rottener than they are.
From Tono Bungay by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
I’ve an idea there is a lot more and rottener activities down south of the line with which our Teutonic peace arbitrator is mixed up.
From The Treasure Trail A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine by Robert Wesley Amick
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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