rotten
Example Sentences
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Boyle Heights was reaching a breaking point as a deadline passed to clean up 88 million pounds of rotten food from the burned-down warehouse and residents begged for relief from the horrifying stench.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 14, 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
She said it was as tall as a 14-year-old kid and smelled like rotten meat.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 10, 2026
Birds and squirrels mainly, but also rotten cats and dogs—pets that had wandered into the park looking for shelter when there was none left anywhere in Manhattan.
From "City of the Plague God" by Sarwat Chadda
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
Time passed and I felt rottener about standing her up without a word, and I couldn’t get up my nerve to go out to Coney and just appear on her doorstep.
From It’s like this, cat by Emily Neville
It’s a pity to have done all that damage though, gets us a rottener name than ever.”
From Haviland's Chum by Bertram Mitford
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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