Wicked means evil, in the storybook sense of witches and cruel stepmothers. The wicked queen, a wicked plan, wicked deeds.
It is old-fashioned in serious moral use, and that is exactly why it works in fairy tales, where it needs no explanation. There are two other lives. It means mischievous and delighted: a wicked grin, a wicked sense of humour. And in British and American slang since the 1980s it means excellent — that is wicked — which is one of the language's neatest reversals. Note there is no rest for the wicked, said cheerfully by people about their own workload.
1adjectivewickedEvil, in a storybook way.
“The wicked stepmother is in every version of the tale.”
synonyms: evil, villainous
2adjectivemischievousMischievous and delighted.
“She has a wicked sense of humour and no filter.”
3adjectiveexcellentExcellent.
“That was a wicked goal by anybody's standards.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
wicked is a quality of badness or delight.
Middle English wicked was built from wicke, meaning wicked, which is probably related to the word behind witch. The -ed ending looks like a past participle and is not one; it was added by analogy, the same way wretched was.
Proto-Indo-European
*weyk-
Middle English
wicked
English, today
wicked
Built from
From Middle English wicked, wikked, an alteration of Middle English wicke, wikke (“morally perverse, evil, wicked”). Of unknown origin. Possibly from an adjectival use of Old English wiċċa (“wizard, sorcerer”), from Proto-West Germanic wikkō (“necromancer, sorcerer”), though the phonology makes this theory difficult to explain. Alternatively, perhaps related to English wicker, Old Norse víkja (“to bend to, yield, turn, move”), Swedish vika (“to bend, fold, give way to”), English weak. The "excellent, awesome" sense is an from the original sense of "evil, mischievous". Compare similar semantic development in terrific and sick.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA