Crossword clues for rottenness
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Rotten \Rot"ten\, a. [Icel. rotinn; akin to Sw. rutten, Dan. radden. See Rot.] Having rotted; putrid; decayed; as, a rotten apple; rotten meat. Hence:
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Offensive to the smell; fetid; disgusting.
You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate As reek of the rotten fens.
--Shak. -
Not firm or trusty; unsound; defective; treacherous; unsafe; as, a rotten plank, bone, stone. ``The deepness of the rotten way.''
--Knolles.Rotten borough. See under Borough.
Rotten stone (Min.), a soft stone, called also Tripoli (from the country from which it was formerly brought), used in all sorts of finer grinding and polishing in the arts, and for cleaning metallic substances. The name is also given to other friable siliceous stones applied to like uses.
Syn: Putrefied; decayed; carious; defective; unsound; corrupt; deceitful; treacherous. [1913 Webster] -- Rot"ten*ly, adv. -- Rot"ten*ness, n.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
late 14c., from rotten + -ness.
Wiktionary
n. The quality of being rotten.
WordNet
n. in a state of progressive putrefaction [syn: putrescence, putridness, corruption]
the quality of rotting and becoming putrid [syn: putrescence]
Usage examples of "rottenness".
Germans to stand fast, ghastly pictures of the weakness and unpreparedness of the Russian army, in a word Russian rottenness and corruption.
Those who have seen him lately say that to every man he met he had been cursing the rottenness and the depravity of our Tendai priesthood.
By little and little he has been induced to trust in that rotten reed, and it communicates some portion of its rottenness to everything around him.
The air was growing fouler and more irrespirable, with a thick, sodden quality, as if from a sediment of material rottenness.
Would that a storm came and shook all this rottenness and worm-eatenness from the tree!