wastrel

wastrel

English

Etymology

1847, waste +‎ -rel (pejorative).[1]

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /weɪstɹəl/

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 912778461, 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:

     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) Maori: kūrapa

References

1. Douglas Harper (2001–2023), “wastrel”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.

Anagrams

• Lawters, Walters, walters, wrastle