garbage

noun gar·bage \ ˈgär-bij \

|Updated on: 20 Aug 2018

Examples: garbage in a Sentence

Definition of garbage

1 a : food waste

b : discarded or useless material

2 a : trash 1b

b : inaccurate or useless data

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Examples of garbage in a Sentence

The park was littered with garbage.
Please take out the garbage.
Raccoons were going through the garbage.
Throw the can in the garbage.
If you ask me, what he said is a bunch of garbage.

Recent Examples of garbage from the Web

An hour after the raid, officers cleared out the encampment, helping municipal workers throw tents and supplies into multiple garbage trucks.

— juliana feliciano reyes, Philly.com, "Philadelphia Police raid Occupy ICE protest camp," 5 July 2018
In March, Sandeep Sharma, another journalist, was crushed to death by a garbage truck in Madhya Pradesh state in central India.

— ashok sharma, Fox News, "Media watchdog urges India to protect journalists," 4 July 2018
In March, Sandeep Sharma, another journalist, was crushed to death by a garbage truck in Madhya Pradesh state in central India.

— Washington Post, "Media watchdog urges India to protect journalists," 4 July 2018
Authorities had confiscated his stock and tossed it into a garbage truck.

— New York Times, "Moroccan Protest Leader Is Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison," 27 June 2018
The facility includes a massive, 4,000 ton tipping floor, or offloading area for garbage trucks, feeding to three processing lines, where the waste is shredded into a form that allows it to be burned.

— katrease stafford, Detroit Free Press, "Detroit Renewable Power waste incinerator pollutes. Is DEQ doing enough?," 21 May 2018
The manufacturer of concrete trucks, waste management trucks, and garbage trucks is employing 746 at the 1.3 million square-foot factory, the former Meadowcraft Complex at the intersection of Carson Road and Highway 79.

— william thornton, AL.com, "Autocar opens $120 million manufacturing facility," 19 Apr. 2018
Populism succeeds where grass-roots movements have failed In Lebanon, the protests led by independent civil society activists in 2015, sparked by a crisis about garbage collection, failed to cause governmental change as many protesters had hoped.

— renad mansour, Washington Post, "An emerging populism is sweeping the Middle East," 11 July 2018
Police say a drunk garbage truck driver in Brooklyn left a trail of destruction, plowing into 9 cars.

— josh magness, kansascity, "Drunk garbage truck driver slammed into 9 cars, cops say. He yelled ‘I didn’t do it,' witness says," 11 June 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'garbage.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Origin and Etymology of garbage

Middle English, "poultry organs and body parts used for food, poultry refuse," borrowed from Anglo-French *garbage (implied in sergant garbagere "kitchen servant tasked with plucking and cleaning poultry"), of obscure origin

Note: On morphological, semantic, or chronological grounds unlikely to be related to Anglo-French garbeler, Middle English garbelen "to remove (impurities) from spices" (see ¹garble) or to Middle French gaburge, grabuge "quarrel, brawl." The Anglo-French collocation sergant garbagere indicates currency of the word as early as 1318 (Household Ordinances of Edward II).

NEW! Time Traveler

First Known Use: 15th century

in the meaning defined at sense 1a

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