Home US English trash

Definition of trash in English:

trash

Pronunciation /traSH/ /træʃ/

noun

  • 1North American Discarded matter; refuse.

    ‘the subway entrance was blocked with trash’
    • ‘Rinse containers well before discarding in the trash.’
    • ‘The sharp needle tips are collected inside the container and the remainder of the syringe barrel can be safely discarded in the trash.’
    • ‘Bacteria and fungi primarily break down the organic matter in the trash.’
    • ‘If it's diseased or infested with insects, bag it and discard in the trash.’
    • ‘Medical sharps, such as disposable hypodermic needles and scalpel blades should never be discarded loosely into the trash.’
    • ‘Drills, lathes, and milling machines produce metal trimmings that machine shops discard as trash or melt down for reuse.’
    • ‘The walls were torn and dirty, books were scattered everywhere; pages ripped out and discarded like trash.’
    • ‘Filled with trash and discarded items, it burned up in the Earth's atmosphere soon afterward.’
    • ‘Snowdrifts of plastic shopping bags and discarded fast-food trash got you down?’
    • ‘Magazines, plastic cups, and all sort of trash were discarded all across the floor.’
    • ‘Landowners, too, can be held responsible should someone decide to discard their trash on private property.’
    • ‘Daphne had work to do, collecting pillows and helping people discard trash.’
    • ‘I know but he refuses to empty the trash himself.’
    • ‘Discarded trash and rusty machines lay dead within the yard.’
    • ‘Someone could go through your trash to find discarded receipts or carbons and use them to learn your account numbers.’
    • ‘They are like waves pounding a shore, the wide, vast shore that is my mind - now beginning to fill with the litter and trash of a discarded relationship.’
    • ‘The older fisherman can recall former days when the waters were clear and the beaches were free of trash and discarded items.’
    • ‘Now, slam-dunk those soggy tissues into the trash… right along with that yearbook photo you ripped down from inside your locker.’
    • ‘Do away with the trash; line your pockets with cash.’
    • ‘She sighed and tossed the bottle into the trash.’
    rubbish, waste, waste material, refuse, litter, garbage, debris, junk, dross, detritus, sweepings, dregs, remains
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    1. 1.1Cultural items, ideas, or objects of poor quality.
      ‘if they read at all, they read trash’
      • ‘I don't subscribe to the view that readers in this market equate broadsheet with quality and tabloid with trash.’
      • ‘I'm also talking rip-offs, exploitation movies, mindless sequels, trash masquerading as quality.’
      • ‘In fact the idea of trash tabloids is just the opposite.’
      • ‘But I think a better activity for you would be learning to spell and read something except trash novels and books.’
      • ‘As far as throwaway movies go, it is top quality trash.’
      • ‘I was lying in my cell, reading some trash from the prison library, wondering who they were going to give me as a cellmate.’
      • ‘You catch up on movies, read trash and get tucked in by nice young men who offer you Vogue…’
      • ‘A small warning though, I have been known to read complete trash from time to time.’
      • ‘Their hands, mostly left clasping right, or right clasping left, holding the odd newspaper or the odd trash tabloid, grasping the odd book like a lifeline.’
      • ‘But after reading this article from this damn tabloid trash, I am being won over.’
      • ‘It'll probably make good trash midweek viewing once the characters have established and the inevitable ‘het girl gets drunk and sleeps with a woman’ happens.’
      • ‘Nothing like an unbiased free press to stir up intelligent debate, although coming from the UK, with its tabloid trash, I'm hardly one to talk really.’
      • ‘Thinking that the books are frivolous trash of no value is apparently an out-of-date misconception common only to those who have never read them.’
      • ‘While I agree with Flux that this movie will probably be trash, I have to disagree about the vehicle shifting properties of the robots.’
      • ‘There's the tabloid variety trash filled with the juicy details of the latest break-ups and make-ups.’
      • ‘This concept was rejected as trash and thrown into dust in 1990 as a result of anti - India insurgency.’
      • ‘It is tabloid trash no matter how you dress it up or justify it to yourselves.’
      • ‘I am astonished that The Register continues to carry this trash (or, for that matter, its author).’
      • ‘Compare the trash of the entirety of this year's SuperBowl halftime compared with the classic halftime performance of U2 two years ago.’
      nonsense, drivel, pap, gibberish, balderdash, bunkum, humbug, rubbish, moonshine
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  • 2North American A person or people regarded as being of very low social standing.

    ‘she would have been considered trash’
    • ‘If she lived in a small American town, we'd consider her trash.’
    • ‘When Eddy showed up at Sir Christopher's Cassandra had immediately sized her up as no good foreign trash and taken to making her education the worst possible.’
    • ‘Yet Shaft keeps on operating, pulling questionable legal tricks and using deceit and deception to fool the gangland trash of the streets.’
    • ‘This idiot is the worst kind of trash imaginable.’
    • ‘Otherwise, I'm afraid, it's you who ends up looking like bottom-feeding trash - no matter how you speak or where you went to school.’
    • ‘Hopefully, this action will aid me in getting rid of the unwanted trash reading my blog.’
    • ‘It was the perfect cliché of poor white redneck trash.’
    • ‘I don't care how rich or accomplished a person is, if they cannot show basic manners in public then they're trash.’
    rabble, scum, vermin, dregs, good-for-nothings, lowest of the low, underclass, the dregs, untouchables, the hoi polloi
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transitive verb

[with object]

  • 1North American informal Damage or wreck.

    ‘my apartment's been totally trashed’
    • ‘For a few minutes scores of protesters, wearing trademark black clothes and gas masks, trashed a branch of the Credito Italiano bank.’
    • ‘A note stuck into my seat told the story: some delivery truck had backed into it, knocking it over, trashing my trunk case, and most of the left side paint and turn signals.’
    • ‘Those who push to strip away the traditional protections of privacy may be trashing a prerequisite of personal freedom.’
    • ‘Union officials reported farm buildings were trashed and vehicles used to take away furniture, fertiliser and building materials.’
    • ‘The Hawkeridge Park facility was reopened last week more than eight months after it was trashed by drunk teenagers.’
    • ‘Martin, we could tell, was entirely cool about the idea of his house getting totally trashed.’
    • ‘The waters of the Tigris ran red with human blood, many libraries perished, water resources trashed, irreplaceable cultural treasures were lost.’
    • ‘I certainly think there was a backlash, especially when I found out their dressing room got trashed after the show.’
    • ‘I told him, my car got trashed in a string of break-ins.’
    • ‘Anyone who scientifically proves any parapsychological phenomenon gets their method criticised and their reputation trashed.’
    • ‘The Rainbow Café was singled out for comprehensive destruction, with stock and equipment inside the building trashed, and the building suffering structural damage.’
    • ‘I booked him into the West Hollywood Hyatt, which is known as the Riot House and is famous for getting trashed by rock stars.’
    • ‘Today is laundry day and I also have to reconstruct R.'s closet, which the cats totally trashed.’
    • ‘All too often one envisages a harried producer refusing to agree to the cost of another trashed vehicle.’
    • ‘The rioters did not try escape, and instead focused their rage on the prison kitchen, which was looted and then trashed, before order was restored by a combined police and correctional services task team.’
    • ‘If you return home and find that you have been robbed and the house trashed, the police will scarcely be persuaded to take an interest in this routine occurrence.’
    • ‘It was badly trashed, very, very badly trashed and I think it cost us about $40,000 with the damage that was done to the clinic.’
    • ‘Two days later Miss Armistead's home was broken into and trashed.’
    • ‘Vandals have trashed 52 shopping trolleys, causing thousands of pounds worth of damage.’
    • ‘Sections of the route had been well and truly trashed and, as this was summer, the state of the lane in winter can only be imagined.’
    wreck, ruin, damage, destroy
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    1. 1.1US Discard.
      ‘they trashed the tapes and sent her back into the studio’
      • ‘Americans trash 2 million tons of old computers and other forms of electronic waste annually.’
      • ‘At this moment, you are quite self-centered; you think of love as something you can get and trash anytime you want.’
      • ‘Unfortunately for McBride, he had upgraded the A room once already, but Cronin's new design necessitated trashing most of that work.’
      • ‘So we both set to work on writing a blog about it; but trashed our initial ideas as both had the terminal flaw of being rather clinical and scientific.’
      • ‘A treasurer resigned - and resigned from Parliament - because of promises trashed after an election just over a decade ago.’
    2. 1.2Computing Kill (a file or process) or wipe (a disk)
      ‘she almost trashed the email window’
      • ‘None of those solutions trashes the email completely, but by setting it all aside, I can scan them all pretty quickly and spot any false positives.’
      • ‘That ignores the fact that most people won't opt-out, but will simply trash the email.’
      • ‘Now (after a couple months training it) anything Mail thinks is junk can be safely trashed automatically.’
      • ‘I hit the wrong key one night and trashed 70K words.’
      • ‘At the very least, do the back-up and be sure that you can recover your system in the unlikely event that it should get trashed.’

  • 2North American informal Criticize severely.

    ‘trade associations trashed the legislation as deficient’
    • ‘What if a critic trashes something that is really close to you?’
    • ‘Critics frequently trash hip hop because commercialism dominates the genre.’
    • ‘The critics trashed it, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music canceled it in mid-run.’
    • ‘This film is getting absolutely trashed by the critics.’
    • ‘That's why he's here tonight at a Republican Convention after putting out a documentary trashing President Bush, heavily criticizing President Bush.’
    • ‘Critics have trashed the film for its antiquated premise.’
    • ‘Yes, the film has been roundly trashed by many critics, but for my money, I thought it had some serious gusto.’
    • ‘But the burden for achieving national unity is on a president who could manage a narrow victory only by savagely trashing his opponent.’
    • ‘The decade has been trashed and abused and generally ostracized.’
    • ‘I know all of you out there in theatreland think that critics are never happier than when they're trashing something, but it's - in most cases - not true.’
    • ‘You're in a unique position in that you're a celebrity but one who's most famous for trashing her fallow celebrates.’
    • ‘He made a film the critics trashed and the audiences ignored.’
    • ‘Regularly, those who seriously criticised it have had their opinions trashed, their lives, and their activities traduced, and we have learned bitterly not to accept anything about it at face value.’
    • ‘The speaker however trashed (pun unintended) our idea.’
    • ‘However their experience is depressing: ideas are dumbed down, creativity ignored, and people trashed.’
    • ‘All the credible scientists, of course, are saying that this is nonsense, it is simple minded, and absolutely have trashed it but the Japanese insist that they must go forward.’
    • ‘Many of our generation glamorized casual sex and drug use, evaded responsibility, and trashed authority.’
    • ‘Unfortunately, the local scene, which should be supported, gets trashed and misrepresented by bitter, brainless writers in this overgrown club flyer you call a paper.’
    • ‘He added: ‘To have your work of 25 years trashed publicly in a few hours is not easy to take.’’
    • ‘I am a relatively well known journalist who the Premier of NSW trashed in public.’
    criticize, lambaste, censure, attack, insult, abuse, give a bad press to, condemn, flay, savage
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  • 3Strip (sugar cane) of its outer leaves to ripen it faster.

Origin

Late Middle English of unknown origin. The verb is first recorded (mid 18th century) in trash (sense 3 of the verb); the other senses have arisen in the 20th century.

Pronunciation

trash

/traSH/ /træʃ/