Word of the Day:

1 : being mixed up : confused

2 : eccentric

"Her addlepated mind flitted butterflylike from one often unrelated subject to another." — Tessa Harris, The Anatomist's Apprentice, 2011

"[Nick Park's] best-known creations are the addlepated, cheese-loving inventor Wallace, and Gromit, his patient, intelligent dog. Park's work helped to spark a new blossoming of stop-motion animation…." — Charles Solomon, The Los Angeles Times, 15 Feb. 2018

In Middle English an adel eye was a putrid egg. The stench of such an egg apparently affected the minds of some witty thinkers, who hatched a comparison between the diminished, unsound quality of an adel eye (or addle egg as it came to be called in modern English) and an empty, confused head—or pate. "Your owne imagination, which was no lesse Idle, then your head was addle all that day," wrote one 17th-century wit at play with the words idle and addle. Today, addle is often found in combination with words referring to one's noggin, as in addlepated, addlebrained, and addle-headed.