Word.ws English Dictionary

wastrels

wastrels is the plural of wastrel.

Meaning of wastrel

Noun

wastrel (countable and uncountable, plural wastrels)

  1. (countable, dated) One who is profligate, who wastes time or resources extravagantly.
    • And so with one thing and other the auld witch raised the fiends of jealousy in that innocent heart. She would cry out that Heriotside was an ill-doing wastrel, and had no business to come and flatter honest lassies.1902, John Buchan, The Outgoing of the Tide
  2. (countable, obsolete) A neglected child.
  3. (obsolete, uncountable) Refuse; rubbish.

Questions about wastrels

What is wastrels the plural of?
Wastrels is the plural of wastrel.

Words near wastrels in the dictionary

  1. wastorels
  2. wastors
  3. wastour
  4. wastours
  5. wastrel
  6. wastrels
  7. wastry
  8. wasts
  9. Wastwater
  10. wasty
  11. Wasukuma

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wastrels (page history and authors); wastrel (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: “wastrels.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wastrels. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.