addled

Meanings

Verb

• Past of addle

Adjective

• Bad, rotten; inviable, containing a dead embryo.
• Confused; mixed up.
• Morbid, corrupt, putrid, or barren.

Origin

• From Middle English addledd, adyld, equivalent to addle + -ed. Addle derives from Old English adel, adela, 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 loan translation of Latin ovum urinum, which is itself an erroneous loan translation of Ancient Greek οὔριον ᾠόν ("putrid egg"), lit. “wind egg”, from οὔριος, from οὖρος (confused by Roman writers with οὔριος, from οὖρον). Because of this usage, the noun in English was taken as an adj. from c. 1600, meaning “putrid”.