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taint

UK/teɪnt/US/teɪnt/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,211 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: taints

A taint is a trace of something bad that spoils the whole. A taint of corruption, without taint, tainted evidence.

The point is that a very small amount ruins everything: tainted evidence is unusable however good the rest of the case is. As a verb it is commoner than the noun. It comes from the same root as tint, and the image is of a dye spreading through cloth.

Definitions of taint

  1. 1nountaintA trace of something bad that spoils the whole.C1

    “The scandal left a taint on his name that never fully disappeared.”

taint is a trace.

Where it comes from

Old French teint means dyed, from Latin tingere, to dye or tinge. Tint is the same root.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *teng-

  2. Latin

    tinctum

  3. Old French

    teint

  4. Middle French

    teint

  5. English, today

    taint

Built from

  • teindre · French — to dye, to tinge

From Middle French teint, from Old French teint (past participle of teindre (“to dye, to tinge”)), from Latin tinctum (past participle of tingere); compare tint.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

taint in the wild

  • A wine found to be tainted on opening is said to be corked or "corky".

    Cork taint

  • In a 2005 study of 2800 bottles tasted at the Wine Spectator blind-tasting facilities in Napa, California, 7% of the bottles were found to be tainted.

    Alternative wine closure

  • Boar taint is found in around 20% of entire male finishing pigs.

    Boar taint

  • Studies show that about 75% of consumers are sensitive to boar taint, leading pork producers to control this in order to maximize profits.

    Boar taint

  • Taint is a term used in the legal field with reference to evidence that has been "tainted" or ruined in some manner.

    Taint (legal)

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.