rotten
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
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The South Coast Air Quality Management District received more than 4,900 odor complaints, “reporting persistent rotten, sour and garbage-like odors,” and issued the company 38 violation notices for public nuisance.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 17, 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
Moldy, bruised and rotten fruits and vegetables should also be avoided.
From Salon ● Jul. 20, 2026
By rubber-stamping a fourth term despite these toxic scandals, football's governing bodies are showing they are content to sit in rotten squalor rather than strive for something better.
From BBC ● Jul. 18, 2026
Her name felt like biting into something sour and rotten.
From "The Way to Rio Luna" by Zoraida Cordova
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
I'm a rottener fraud and failure than the Elder here.
From The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet by Bernard Shaw
"But I dunno as he's any rottener than the rest."
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
“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
“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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So Bad: Synonyms for "Awful"
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