wastrel

English

Etymology

1847, waste +‎ -rel (pejorative).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /weɪstɹəl/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

Noun

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

• See also Thesaurus:spendthrift

Translations

A person who wastes resources and/or time.

• Bulgarian: разсипник (bg) (razsipnik)
• Georgian: მფლანგველი (mplangveli), ფანტია (panṭia), უქნარა (uknara), არაფრისმაქნისი (araprismaknisi)
• Macedonian: ра́сипник m (rásipnik)
• Maori: kūrapa

Anagrams

• Lawters, Walters, walters, wrastle