wastrel

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English

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Etymology

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1847, waste +‎ -rel (pejorative).[1]

Pronunciation

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Noun

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wastrel (countable and uncountable, plural wastrels)

  1. (countable, dated) One who is profligate, who wastes time or resources extravagantly.
    • 1902, John Buchan, The Outgoing of the Tide:
      And so with one thing and other the auld witch raised the fiends of jealousy in that innocent heart. She would cry out that Heriotside was an ill-doing wastrel, and had no business to come and flatter honest lassies.
    • 1929 September, Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, uniform edition, London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, [], published 1931 (April 1935 printing), →OCLC, page 32:
      Mary’s mother—if that was her picture—may have been a wastrel in her spare time (she had thirteen children by a minister of the church), but if so her gay and dissipated life had left too few traces of its pleasures on her face.
    • 2019 November 19, Tom Meadowcroft, “Unite to Remain could hurt the anti-Brexit cause. That’s why I’m no longer a Green candidate”, in The Guardian[1]:
      Party politics didn’t come naturally to me. I was a twentysomething crypto-anarchist wastrel from the outer suburbs of Bristol who’d spent five years after university moving between jobs and getting distracted.
  2. (countable, obsolete) A neglected child.
  3. (uncountable, obsolete) Refuse; rubbish.

Synonyms

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Translations

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References

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  1. ^ Douglas Harper (2001–2024) “wastrel”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.

Anagrams

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