Other forms: worst, worse
Bad is the plain word for anything you would rather not have — wrong, harmful, unpleasant or poorly made. A bad smell in the fridge, bad weather all week, a bad photo where everybody blinked.
It stretches a long way. Bad at something means unskilled (I am bad at names); bad for you means harmful (sugar is bad for your teeth); milk that has gone bad has turned; a bad back or a bad cold means serious rather than wicked; and feeling bad about something means guilty, while feeling bad on its own means ill. The comparatives are worse and worst — badder and baddest belong to comic books. Not bad, said with a shrug, means better than expected, and in some slang bad flips right over into praise. The adverb is badly: he sings badly, and he wants it badly.
1adjectivebadOf poor quality, or unpleasant.~66%
“That was a bad film and we all knew it after ten minutes.”
2adjectivemorallyMorally wrong, or badly behaved.~26%
“He played the bad brother in the film.”
3adjectiveharmfulHarmful to someone or something.~2%
“Sitting still all day is bad for your back.”
4adjectiveseriousSerious or severe.~2%
“She has a bad cough and a temperature.”
5adjectivelongerNo longer fit to eat.~2%
“The milk has gone bad in this heat.”
6adjectivesorrySorry or guilty about something.~2%
“I feel bad about forgetting your birthday.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 7 sentences found in the wild and placed 7 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Bad turns up in Middle English as badde, 'wicked, evil', and there the trail stops — nobody has proved where it came from. One suggestion links it to Old English bæddel; another makes it a Norse borrowing, near words for damage and fear. For a word this common, that silence is strange, and it is a reminder that the plainest words often have the murkiest histories.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰedʰ-
Middle English
badde
English, today
bad
Built from
From Middle English badde. From Middle English bad, badde (“wicked, evil, depraved”), of unknown origin. Perhaps a shortening of Old English bæddel (“hermaphrodite”) (for loss of -el compare muche from myċel, and wenche from wenċel), or at least related to it and/or to bædan (“to defile”), compare Old High German pad (“hermaphrodite”). Alternatively, perhaps a loan from Old Norse - into Middle English, compare Norwegian bad (“effort, trouble, fear”), East Danish bad (“damage, destruction, fight”), from the Proto-Germanic - noun badą, whence also badōną (“to frighten”), Old Saxon undarbadōn (“to frighten”), Norwegian Nynorsk bada (“to weigh down, press”); ultimately from Proto-Indo-European bʰedʰ- (“to bend, press, push, oppress”). بد.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA