Dictionaries › English

spoil

Pronunciation: /spɔɪl/

The English word “spoil” has 14 meanings listed here.

verb

  1. To strip (someone who has been killed or defeated) of arms or armour.
  2. To strip or deprive (someone) of possessions; to rob, despoil.
  3. To plunder, pillage (a city, country etc.).
  4. To carry off (goods) by force; to steal.
  5. To ruin; to damage in such a way as to make undesirable or unusable.
  6. To ruin the character of, by overindulgence; to coddle or pamper to excess.
  7. To go bad; to become sour or rancid; to decay.
  8. To render (a ballot) invalid by deliberately defacing.
  9. To prematurely reveal major events or the ending of (a story etc.); to ruin (a surprise) by exposing ahead of time as a spoiler.
  10. To reduce the lift generated by an airplane or wing by deflecting air upwards, usually with a spoiler.
  11. To be very eager (for something).

noun

  1. Plunder taken from an enemy or victim.
  2. The act of taking plunder from an enemy or victim; spoliation, pillage, rapine.
  3. Material (such as rock or earth) removed in the course of an excavation, or in mining or dredging. Tailings. Such material could be utilised somewhere else.

Etymology

From Middle English spoilen, spuylen, borrowed from Old French espoillier, espollier, espuler, from Latin spoliō, spoliāre (“pillage, ruin, spoil”).

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “spoil” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.