addled

English

Etymology

From Middle English addledd, adyld, equivalent to addle (“urine, liquid filth”) +‎ -ed. Addle derives from Old English adel, adela (“mud, mire, liquid manure”), cognate with Old Swedish adel (“urine”), Middle Low German adel, Dutch aal (“manure”). Used in noun phrase addle egg (mid-13c.) “egg that does not hatch, rotten egg”, lit. “urine egg”, a calque of Latin ovum urinum, which is itself an erroneous calque of Ancient Greek οὔριον ᾠόν (oúrion ōión, “putrid egg”, literally “wind egg”), from οὔριος (oúrios, “of the wind”), from οὖρος (oûros, “fair wind”) (confused by Roman writers with οὔριος (oúrios, “of urine”), from οὖρον (oûron, “urine”)). Because of this usage, the noun in English was taken as an adjective from c. 1600, meaning “putrid”.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈæ.dəld/

• Audio (Southern England):

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• Audio (General American):

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Verb

addled

1. simple past and past participle of addle

Adjective

addled (comparative more addled, superlative most addled)

1. (of eggs) Bad, rotten; inviable, containing a dead embryo.
   • 1854, Charles Dickens, “Very ridiculous”, in Hard Times. For These Times, London: Bradbury & Evans, […], →OCLC, 3rd book (Garnering), page 275:

     He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been—in that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they had not been whistled away—by the fervour of this reproach.

   • 1861, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XI, in Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC:

     I haven’t a bit o’ patience with you—sitting on an addled egg for ever, as if there was never a fresh un in the world.

   • 1892, Rudyard Kipling, “The Conundrum of the Workshops”, in Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses, 3rd edition, London: Methuen & Co. […], →OCLC, page 168:

     We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice-peg, / We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yelk of an addled egg,

2. (figurative, of persons or their thoughts) Confused; mixed up.

   Synonyms: addleheaded, addlebrained, addlepated, muddled, muddied, muddleheaded

   coke-addled;   crack-addled

   • 1884 December 10, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter XXXVII, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) […], London: Chatto & Windus, […], →OCLC, page 381:

     But she counted and counted till she got that addled she’d start to count in the basket for a spoon sometimes; […] .

   • 2011, Philip A. G. Kelly, My Odyssey, page 90:

     […] my addled brain required as much sleep as an infant.

   • 2024 December 16, Dave Philipps, Mark Abramson, “Seeking Relief From Brain Injury, Some Veterans Turn to Psychedelics”, in The New York Times‎^[2], →ISSN:

     A long combat career exposed to weapons blasts had left him struggling with depression and anger, a frayed memory and addled concentration.

   • 2025 May 21, Ezra Klein, quoting Jake Tapper, “How Groupthink Protected Biden and Re-elected Trump”, in The New York Times‎^[3], →ISSN:

     They told me it was because they knew the Hur report was about to drop. And they knew it would have all this stuff about classified information and about him seeming superold and addled behind the scenes.

   • 2025 June 7, Paul Rosenzweig, “The Biden Investigation Is a Path to Even Greater Lawlessness”, in The Atlantic:

     President Donald Trump’s presidential memorandum ordering an investigation of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and his use of the autopen […] is also nonsensical fan service, amplifying addled MAGA conspiracy theories that contend, with a straight face, that Biden was really a robotic clone.

3. (obsolete) Morbid, corrupt, putrid, or barren.

Synonyms

• addle

Derived terms

• drug-addled
• unaddled

Translations

rotten (of eggs)

• Dutch: rot (nl)
• Greek: κλούβιος (el) (kloúvios)
• Latvian: vanckars m (an egg with a half-developed dead embryo), sapuvusi f (rotten)
• Russian: проту́хший (ru) (protúxšij)

Anagrams

• daddle