overwordExplorer
ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

addled.

Bad, rotten; inviable, containing a dead embryo.

6 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/ˈæ.dəld/
  1. Bad, rotten; inviable, containing a dead embryo.

  2. Confused; mixed up.

    figuratively
    coke-addled
    crack-addled
  3. Morbid, corrupt, putrid, or barren.

    obsolete
Where this word comes from

From Middle English addled, adyld, equivalent to addle (“urine, liquid filth”) + -ed. Addle derives from Old English adel, adela (“mud, mire, liquid manure”), cognate with Old Swedish adel (“urine”), Middle Low German adel, Dutch aal (“manure”). Used in noun phrase addle egg (mid-13c.) “egg that does not hatch, rotten egg”, lit. “urine egg”, a calque of Latin ovum urinum, which is itself an erroneous calque of Ancient Greek οὔριον ᾠόν (oúrion ōión, “putrid egg”, literally “wind egg”), from οὔριος (oúrios, “of the wind”), from οὖρος (oûros, “fair wind”) (confused by Roman writers with οὔριος (oúrios, “of urine”), from οὖρον (oûron, “urine”)). Because of this usage, the noun in English was taken as an adjective from c. 1600, meaning “putrid”.

FROM WORD TO NAME

Try it on your idea.

addled has 6 characters. Say it out loud, try it alongside a description of your project, and see whether its meaning fits what you want to create.

addled studioaddled workshello, addled

These are naming prompts. Meanings and pronunciation can vary; existing brand and domain uses have not been checked.

Explore the name generator

A word with a source.

Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.