as in messy
lacking in order, neatness, and often cleanliness
is there any wonder that you can never find anything in your littered desk?
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Recent Examples of littered
Scarlett Harris, Time, 9 Oct. 2025
Cigarette butts are the most littered item on the planet.
—Kurt Knutsson, FOXNews.com, 16 Aug. 2025
Adjective
The series does not touch on the tabloid attention that followed the Beckhams in 2004, when it was alleged that David had an affair with his personal assistant, Rebecca Loos, and the many further accusations of cheating that littered gossip columns after.
—Scarlett Harris, Time, 9 Oct. 2025
Cigarette butts are the most littered item on the planet.
—Kurt Knutsson, FOXNews.com, 16 Aug. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for littered
Adjective
-
Beyond the hardware, it’s packed with AI features like Circle to Search for instant lookups and Handwriting Assist to tidy up your messy notes, all backed by a 20-hour battery that lasts well beyond the standard workday.—
Juhi Wadia,
PC Magazine,
25 Mar. 2026
-
Things with Turner got messy quickly with custody issues rearing their head, but seemed to have settled down now.—
Madeleine Marr,
Miami Herald,
24 Mar. 2026
Verb
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Close to 15% of posts on the platform are already AI-generated, a study from last year revealed.—
Jibin Joseph,
PC Magazine,
26 Mar. 2026
-
For reference, Mike Smith, a North Carolina musician who recently pleaded guilty to charges related to streaming fraud, allegedly made $8 million by spreading millions of fake streams across hundreds of thousands of tracks (many of them AI-generated).—
Jon Blistein,
Rolling Stone,
25 Mar. 2026
Adjective
-
The fan disappointment was echoed in the community dedicated to Barbie on Reddit, where many called out the organizers for such a chaotic event.—
Rebecca Cohen,
NBC news,
30 Mar. 2026
-
The footage captures a chaotic moment many pet owners recognize instantly—when curiosity tips over into trouble.—
Melissa Fleur Afshar,
MSNBC Newsweek,
30 Mar. 2026
Verb
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Traders and investors are laser-focused on the inflation being kindled by higher oil prices.—
Christopher Cann,
USA Today,
25 Mar. 2026
-
If ‘Oxen’ occupies a region of Ulysses where Joyce’s exquisite ear for memorably musical sentences (‘Mild fire of wine kindled his veins’) takes a back seat to the leaden hum of meta-literature, that is no reason not to be awed by his chutzpah.—
Literary Hub,
Literary Hub,
5 Feb. 2026
Adjective
-
The breakthrough by a team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) mimics how bats rely on simple echolocation to move through dark, cluttered environments with minimal neural processing.—
Jijo Malayil,
Interesting Engineering,
27 Mar. 2026
-
His front yard became cluttered with a living room’s worth of patio furniture, bar stools, storage containers, a cord of firewood and a fire pit.—
Laura Bauer,
Kansas City Star,
26 Mar. 2026
Verb
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The humor spawned by Emma’s confession will strike some as deeply unfunny, while others might uncomfortably chuckle at its cleverness.—
Brian Truitt,
USA Today,
31 Mar. 2026
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Recently published in the journal Nature, the latest study into the birth of the canine, which might have spawned an immediate bond between dog and man, reconstructed whole genomes, 10,000 years old, and cross-evaluated them with modern-day canines.—
Maria Mocerino,
Interesting Engineering,
30 Mar. 2026
Adjective
-
Initially intriguing, the jumbled chronology eventually proves to be largely decorative until a disappointing late-reel twist explains why the labored device was deployed in the first place.—
Los Angeles Times,
Los Angeles Times,
26 Mar. 2026
-
But Buffon protested that a system of tidy categories based upon a single criterion belied the lush and jumbled profusion of nature.—
Literary Hub,
Literary Hub,
25 Mar. 2026
Adjective
-
On January 7, Saman wrote me that two of her Afghan neighbors had just been arrested and sent to a deportation camp that was rumored to be filthy, cold, and overcrowded.—
George Packer,
The Atlantic,
24 Mar. 2026
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The filmmaker shows a strong handle over the film’s fanciful tone and fitfully filthy sense of humor, and he’s credited with composing the film’s score full of squawking brass instruments and skittish strings in addition to writing, directing and editing.—
Stephen Saito,
Variety,
16 Mar. 2026
Cite this Entry
“Littered.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/littered. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026.
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