garbage
Formsgarbages, garbaging, garbaged
- 1
- 2Waste consisting of discarded food of any kind.
The garbage from the kitchen was mostly peelings, bones, and coffee grounds.
Spoiled produce and table scraps make up most of a restaurant's garbage.
Similarwaste, rubbish, refuse, scraps, slops
Note
Kitchen waste is close to where the word began. Late Middle English garbage meant the offal of a fowl, giblets and kitchen scraps, and earlier simply "what is purged away," from Old French garber, "to make clean." In the US, Canada and Australia it is the everyday word for food scraps. It is uncountable: some garbage, a bag of garbage, never a garbage.
- 3A receptacle or place for putting waste material.
He tossed the junk mail straight into the garbage.
Someone needs to take the garbage out to the alley before morning.
Similartrash, bin, dustbin, wastebasket
Note
Here the word names the container by what goes into it. When you throw a newspaper into the garbage or take the garbage out, you mean the bin itself. Because the phrasing matches the waste itself, context decides which is meant. Taking the garbage out usually moves both the can and its contents.
- 4
- 5Something or someone regarded as worthless.
Critics dismissed the cheap sequel as garbage.
He quit because the company treated its staff like garbage.
Similartrash, rubbish, junk, dirt
Note
Applied to people, the word carries contempt at full strength. Owen Chadwick's The Victorian Church (1966) quotes the Christian Advocate of 1835 calling a cabinet "the very garbage of Toryism," meaning the worst a party had to offer. The pattern "the very garbage of" followed by a group is an insult, not a description. Use it knowing it will land as one.
- 6Of very poor quality; bad.
Their customer service is absolutely garbage.
He gave a garbage excuse that no one believed.
Similarterrible, awful, rubbish, lousy
Oppositeexcellent, great, superb
Note
The adjective turns the noun into a verdict: garbage advice, a pretty garbage experience, a relationship that is completely garbage. It has no comparative or superlative, so there is no "garbager." Speakers strengthen it with totally, completely or pretty instead. It is informal and keeps company with cruder words, so in careful writing poor or worthless is the safer choice.
- 7An easy shot, especially one scored close to the basket with little effort or defense.
With the defense scrambled, he finished easy garbage at the rim.
Late in the blowout, the bench padded the lead with garbage.
Note
A piece of sports slang that mostly works attributively, as in garbage shot. Coach & Athlete in 1962 uses it for the easy shots a big man takes from right underneath the basket. Update 1981: The Great Contemporary Issues applies "garbage shots" to tennis. The word's judgment is about ease: such points count on the scoreboard but take little skill to make.
- 8Allocated memory that is no longer in use but has not yet been freed.
The runtime periodically reclaims garbage so the application doesn't exhaust memory.
A long-running process can accumulate garbage until performance degrades.
Note
A memory-management term. The storage is still allocated, but nothing in the running program uses it anymore. The idea lives in the gap between two states, in use and freed: garbage is whatever sits in that gap until something reclaims it. Don't confuse it with misread data, where the bytes are live and only their interpretation is wrong.
- 9Data that has been misread as a different kind of data, producing meaningless output.
Reading the binary file as plain text produced screens of garbage.
A mismatched character encoding turns readable text into garbage.
Similargibberish, junk, nonsense
Note
Here nothing is wrong with the data; the fault is in the reading. Bytes that are valid in one format turn to noise when decoded as another, as when a binary file is shown as text or a document is opened under the wrong character encoding. Programmers say a program prints garbage when its output looks random but the cause is a type mismatch.
Less common meanings
- 10Plant matter, such as vegetables or fruit, that is rotten, foul, or not yet ripe.
By autumn's end the store held more garbage than sound roots, all rot and mold.
The market stalls reeked of garbage where unripe fruit had spoiled in the heat.
Note
A regional survival rather than a general sense. In the dialects of Cumbria and Lancashire, the word has meant rotting or unripe vegetable matter, such as spoiled roots or green fruit, rather than waste in general. It is archaic, so expect it in older or local writing. In present-day speech the word will be heard as ordinary waste of any kind.
- 11The bowels and refuse parts of an animal's flesh; offal.
After the hog was killed, the garbage was set aside for the dogs and the rest salted away.
The cook would not waste the garbage, stewing the liver and lights into a coarse pottage.
Note
The oldest meaning the word kept: the entrails a cook or butcher removed. It lies close to the late Middle English sense of a fowl's giblets traced at the kitchen-waste meaning. It is now obsolete, and offal or entrails is the word to use today. If you meet it in an old recipe or account, read it as the inner parts of a carcass, not as trash.
- 12To remove the entrails from a carcass; to eviscerate.
I have bought at Boston a dozen Pidgeons ready pulled and garbidged for three pence.
1674, John Josselyn, Two Voyages to New EnglandSimilargut, disembowel, eviscerate
Note
An obsolete verb from the same kitchen as the offal meaning: to garbage a bird was to pull out its innards. John Josselyn's Two Voyages to New England (1674) mentions buying "a dozen Pidgeons ready pulled and garbidged" at Boston, in the spelling of its day. Gut, disembowel or eviscerate now does the work, and this verb is no longer used.
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Origin
From late Middle English 'garbage', first meaning refuse or the offal and giblets of a fowl, literally what is purged away. It came from Anglo-Norman and Old French 'garber' ('to refine or make neat'), which was of Germanic origin, from Frankish '*garwijan' ('to make ready'), akin to Old English 'ġearwian' ('to make ready, adorn').