garbage

noun gar·bage \ ˈgär-bij \

Updated on: 17 Apr 2018

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

He was born in the Bronx but grew up in bucolic South Salem, New York; did a stint in the Air Force; and then took a job driving a garbage truck.

— rich cohen, The Atlantic, "The Mobster Who Bought His Son a Hockey Team," 14 Apr. 2018
Hilaire and Ambroise were observed taking $100 from another resident to take away the bulk garbage, police said.

— linda trischitta, Sun-Sentinel.com, "Workers wanted cash to haul away trash, cops say," 13 Apr. 2018
Three days before Christmas, crews clearing a camp along Commercial Avenue placed a tent, bedding and other discards into the back of a garbage truck.

— jeff mcdonald, sandiegouniontribune.com, "City official who was fired after near-fatal garbage-truck incident back on San Diego payroll," 3 Apr. 2018
Oscar, a Great Horned Owl, came to Horizon Wings approximately 11 years ago, after being hit by a garbage truck in New Haven.

— joan hunt, Courant Community, "Rescue Owls Visit Wethersfield Library," 28 Mar. 2018
Starting with one garbage truck in 1968, Huzienga built Waste Management into a Fortune 500 company.

— mike barnes, The Hollywood Reporter, "H. Wayne Huizenga, Builder of the Blockbuster Video Chain, Dies at 80," 23 Mar. 2018
In 1962, with a $5,000 loan from his father-in-law, Huizenga started with one used garbage truck in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where his father had moved his family.

— Bloomberg.com, "Wayne Huizenga, Empire-Builder in Videos and Trash, Dies at 80," 23 Mar. 2018
The orecchiette is a little thick and doughy, but that didn’t stop me from shoveling them into my pasta hole like a garbage truck swallowing a holiday weekend’s worth of waste.

— alex beggs, Bon Appetit, "6 New Trader Joe's Products, Plus Something Called a ‘Blarney Scone,‘ Reviewed," 14 Mar. 2018
My best political advice for a long time came from the guy who collected the garbage, a political leader in Queens.

— abigail jones, Newsweek, "International Women’s Day: Gloria Steinem on #MeToo, Trump and Making Change Happen," 28 Feb. 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).

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First Known Use: 15th century

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