Word.ws English Dictionary

wastes

/weɪsts/

wastes is the plural of waste.

wastes is the third-person singular simple present indicative of waste.

Meaning of waste

Noun

waste (countable and uncountable, plural wastes)

  1. Excess of material, useless by-products, or damaged, unsaleable products; garbage; rubbish.
  2. Excrement or urine.
    • The cage was littered with animal waste.
  3. A wasteland; an uninhabited desolate region; a wilderness or desert.
    • We went down accordingly into the waste, and began to make our toilsome and devious travel towards the eastern verge.1886 May 1 – July 31, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751: […], London; Paris: Cassell & Company, published 1886, →OCLC
  4. A place that has been laid waste or destroyed.
  5. A large tract of uncultivated land.
  6. (historical) The part of the land of a manor (of whatever size) not used for cultivation or grazing, nowadays treated as common land.

See all 29 meanings of waste

Phrases with wastes

Words that rhyme with wastes

Questions about wastes

What is wastes the plural of?
Wastes is the plural of waste.
How do you pronounce wastes?
Wastes is pronounced /weɪsts/.

Words near wastes in the dictionary

  1. wasteproof
  2. waster
  3. wasterful
  4. wasters
  5. wastery
  6. wastes
  7. wastes away
  8. wastes breath
  9. wastes of oxygen
  10. wastes of skin
  11. wastes of space

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wastes (page history and authors); waste (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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Cite this entry: “wastes.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wastes. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.