Word.ws English Dictionary

mad

/ˈmæd/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Australia/ˈmæːd/

mad adjective: insane; crazy; mentally deranged.

Adjective

mad (comparative madder, superlative maddest)

  1. (UK) Insane; crazy; mentally deranged.
    • You want to spend a thousand pounds on a pair of shoes? Are you mad?
    • He's got this mad idea that he's irresistible to women.
  2. (US, informal) Angry; annoyed.
    • Are you mad at me?
    • And I punished them oft in euery Synagogue, and compelled them to blaspheme, and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them euen vnto strange cities.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Acts 26:11
  3. (US, informal) Used litotically to indicate satisfaction or approval.
    • Wow, you really made this pie from scratch? I'm not mad at it.
    • I'm not mad at this little house, though.2019, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, season 13, episode 3
  4. (Ireland, UK, informal) Bizarre; incredible.
    • It's mad that I got that job back a day after being fired.
  5. Extremely foolish or unwise; irrational; imprudent.
  6. Wildly confused or excited.
    • to be mad with terror, lust, or hatred
    • It is the land of graven images, and they are mad upon their idols.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Jeremiah 1:88
  7. (colloquial, usually, on or about) Extremely enthusiastic about; crazy about; infatuated with; overcome with desire for.
    • Aren't you just mad for that red dress?
    • My wife is soccer-mad.
  8. Abnormally ferocious or furious; or, rabid, affected with rabies.
    • a mad dog
  9. (New-York, slang, African-American Vernacular) Intensifier, signifying abundance or high quality of a thing; very, much, excellent or many.
    • I gotta give you mad props for scoring us those tickets.
      Their lead guitarist has mad skills.
      There are always mad girls at those parties.
  10. Having impaired polarity.

Adverb

mad (not comparable)

  1. (Ireland, New-York, UK, dialectal, slang, African-American Vernacular) Intensifier; to a large degree; extremely; exceedingly; very; unbelievably.
    • He was driving mad slow.
    • It's mad hot today.
    Synonyms:
    hella, helluv, wicked

Verb

mad (third-person singular simple present mads, present participle madding, simple past and past participle madded)

  1. (intransitive, obsolete) To be or become mad.
    • The imperial Elizabetta gazed with surprise at the youthful and unpretending appearance of the little being that had set the world madding.1832, [Washington Irving], “The Legend of the Rose of the Alhambra, or the Page and the Ger-Falcon”, in The Alhambra: A Series of Tales and Sketches of the Moors and Spaniards. […], volume II...
  2. (Jamaica, US, colloquial) To madden, to anger, to frustrate.
    • This musick mads me, let it sound no more.1595 December 9 (first known performance), William Shakespeare, “The Life and Death of King Richard the Second”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to...
    • He that mads others, if he were so humoured, would be as mad himself, as much grieved and tormented […].1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC, partition I, section...

Noun (1) capitalized: MAD

MAD (countable and uncountable, plural MADs)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of mutual assured destruction or mutually assured destruction.
    • [T]he only bombs anyone dropped—on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—were Uncle Sam's message to non-nuclear Japan. MAD was salvation. MAD was security. MAD was the way of life most of us grew up with, the prevailing logic of uneasy peace. So whatever became of our mad, mad world?2005 February 7, Peter Preston, “A nuclear Iran is not the problem”, in The Guardian
    • But the American government worries that MAD-style deterrence will no longer work. Terrorists, for example, might not care about the threat of destruction.2005 February 24, “Muon-assured defence”, in The Economist, →ISSN
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of magnetic anomaly detector.
  3. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of mothers against decapentaplegic.
  4. (abbreviation, acronym) Acronym of magnetically-arrested disc, a type of black hole accretion disc).
  5. (abbreviation, initialism, dental, prosthetics) Initialism of mandibular advancement device.

Proper noun (1) capitalized: MAD

MAD

  1. (abbreviation, acronym) Acronym of Michigan algorithm decoder, a programming language, a variant of ALGOL, developed in 1959 at the University of Michigan.

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Mad

Mad

  1. A diminutive of the female given name Madeline (and its variants).
    • Mad, your boyfriend did a really shitty thing. In response, you got rat-faced and kissed someone.2014, Giovanna Fletcher, You're the One That I Want

Noun (2) capitalized: Mad

Mad (uncountable)

  1. (abbreviation, acronym) Acronym of mothers against decapentaplegic.

mad meaning in Hindi, Urdu, Assamese and Pashto

mad in Hindi

insane
पागल pāgal, उन्मद unmad, बावला bāvlā, बावरा bāvrā, विक्षिप्त vikṣipt

mad in Urdu

insane
پاگل pāgal

mad in Assamese

insane
বলিয়া bolia, পগলা pogola

mad in Pashto

insane
لېونی lewanay
angry
لېویى lewanay
wanting intensely
لېونی lewanay
More languagesFewer languages
mad in Arabic
مَجْنُون majnūn
mad in Malay
gila
mad in Indonesian
gila, edan, gusar
mad in Persian
دیوانه divâne
mad in Thai
บ้า bâa, วิกลจริต vi khon ja rit
mad in Vietnamese
điên, cuồng

Examples of mad in a sentence

  • She's mad on the baking these days.
  • He seems mad keen on her.
  • I have heard my grandsire say full oft, / Extremity of griefs would make men mad.c. 1588–1593 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies...
  • Sometimes, I feel sure he is as mad as a hatter; and then, just as he is at his maddest, I find there is method in his madness.1920 October, Agatha Christie, “The Arrest”, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles […], New York, N.Y.; London: Grosset & Dunlap, published...
  • Manuel: Is it madness to see the future?2008, BioWare, Mass Effect (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Eden Prime:
  • She was so mad she wouldn't speak to me for quite a spell, but at last I coaxed her into going up to Miss Emmeline's room and fetching down a tintype of the missing Deacon man.1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VI, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:

All 40 example sentences with mad

Synonyms of mad

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of mad

Forms of mad

Adjective
comparativemadder
superlativemaddest
Verb
third-person singular presentmads
present participlemadding
past participlemadded
pastmadded
Noun
pluralMADs

Origin of mad

From Middle English mad, madde, madd, medd, from Old English ġemǣd, ġemǣded (“enraged”), past participle of ġemǣdan, *mǣdan (“to make insane or foolish”), from Proto-Germanic *maidijaną (“to change; damage; cripple; injure; make mad”), from Proto-Germanic *maidaz ("weak; crippled"; compare Old English gemād (“silly, mad”), Old High German gimeit (“foolish, crazy”), literary German gemeit (“mad, insane”), Gothic 𐌲𐌰𐌼𐌰𐌹𐌸𐍃 (gamaiþs, “crippled”)), from Proto-Indo-European *mey- ("to change"; compare Old Irish máel (“bald, dull”), Old Lithuanian ap-maitinti (“to wound”), Sanskrit मेथति (méthati, “he hurts, comes to blows”)).

Inherited from Middle English madden. Compare Old English ġemǣdan.

Words formed from mad

Phrases with mad

41 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with mad

26 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about mad

What does mad mean?
Mad means insane; crazy; mentally deranged.
What is mad in Hindi?
Mad in Hindi is पागल (pāgal), उन्मद (unmad), बावला (bāvlā). See Mad meaning in Hindi.
How do you use mad in a sentence?
She's mad on the baking these days.
What part of speech is mad?
Mad can be an adjective, an adverb, a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce mad?
Mad is pronounced /ˈmæd/.

Words near mad in the dictionary

  1. Macy
  2. Maczka
  3. Maczkas
  4. macédoine
  5. macédoines
  6. mad
  7. mad apple
  8. mad apples
  9. mad as a bear with a sore head
  10. mad as a box of frogs
  11. mad as a brush

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mad (page history and authors); MAD (page history and authors); Mad (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-mad.ogg.

Cite this entry: “mad.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mad. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.