Word.ws English Dictionary

adulterated

adulterated adjective: intentionally tainted with impurities (usually as motivated by cheapening the production of a food product or enhancing the psychotropic effects of a street drug). Also the simple past and past participle of adulterate.

Adjective

adulterated (not comparable)

  1. Intentionally tainted with impurities (usually as motivated by cheapening the production of a food product or enhancing the psychotropic effects of a street drug).
    • Near-synonyms: laced, tainted, contaminated; see also Thesaurus:contaminated
    • The problem of adulterated milk has periodically reemerged as a public health menace, from New York in the 1850s to China in 2008.

Also used as

adulterated is also the simple past and past participle of adulterate.

Synonyms of adulterated

All synonyms of adulterated

Origin of adulterated

The adjectival sense's relation to adultery is the common theme that corruption or pollution has occurred; more at adulterate. By surface analysis, adulterate + -ed.

Words formed from adulterated

Questions about adulterated

What does adulterated mean?
Adulterated means intentionally tainted with impurities (usually as motivated by cheapening the production of a food product or enhancing the psychotropic effects of a street drug).
What part of speech is adulterated?
Adulterated is an adjective.

Words near adulterated in the dictionary

  1. adulter
  2. adulterable
  3. adulterant
  4. adulterants
  5. adulterate
  6. adulterated
  7. adulteratedst
  8. adulterately
  9. adulterateness
  10. adulterates
  11. adulteratest

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: adulterated (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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