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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

corrupt.

Willing to act dishonestly for personal gain; accepting bribes.

7 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/kəˈɹʌpt/
  1. Willing to act dishonestly for personal gain; accepting bribes.

  2. In a depraved state; debased; perverted; morally degenerate; weak in morals.

    The government here is corrupt, so we'll emigrate to escape them.
  3. Abounding in errors; not genuine or correct; in an invalid state.

    The text of the manuscript is corrupt.
    It turned out that the program was corrupt - that's why it wouldn't open.
  4. In a putrid state; spoiled; tainted; vitiated; unsound.

Where this word comes from

From Middle English corrupten, derived from Latin corruptus, past participle of corrumpō (“to destroy, ruin, injure, spoil, corrupt, bribe”), from com- (“together”) + rumpō (“to break in pieces”).

verb/kəˈɹʌpt/
  1. To make corrupt; to change from good to bad; to draw away from the right path; to deprave; to pervert.

    transitive
    Don't you dare corrupt my son with those disgusting pictures!
  2. To become putrid, tainted, or otherwise impure; to putrefy; to rot.

    archaic · intransitive
  3. To introduce errors; to place into an invalid state.

    transitive
    Unplugging a flash drive without dismounting it first can corrupt the data stored on the drive.
  4. To debase or make impure by alterations or additions; to falsify.

    to corrupt language, or a holy text
    to corrupt a book
  5. To waste, spoil, or consume; to make worthless.

Where this word comes from

From Middle English corrupten, derived from Latin corruptus, past participle of corrumpō (“to destroy, ruin, injure, spoil, corrupt, bribe”), from com- (“together”) + rumpō (“to break in pieces”).

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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.