Word.ws English Dictionary

wrackful

wrackful adjective: ruinous; destructive.

Adjective

wrackful (comparative more wrackful, superlative most wrackful)

  1. ruinous; destructive.
    • As it happened, his destiny, aided by this opportunity, carried him far beyond, so that the new era in his political fortunes which opened amidst the wrackful confusion in which Liberalism found itself in 1874 and the years immediately following must be accounted the most important and fateful of...1904, Henry Leach, The Duke of Devonshire
    • No longer surrounded by a wooden shell in a wrackful sea, but by an aluminum box in its slot with all the other boxes, he stared at the pinwheel of stars on the cover of his library book.2000, Brian McNaughton, Even More Nasty Stories

Forms of wrackful

comparativemore wrackful
superlativemost wrackful

Origin of wrackful

From Middle English wrakeful, wrakful, equivalent to wrack + -ful. See also wrake.

Questions about wrackful

What does wrackful mean?
Wrackful means ruinous; destructive.
What part of speech is wrackful?
Wrackful is an adjective.

Words near wrackful in the dictionary

  1. wracked
  2. wracked one's brain
  3. wrackedst
  4. wrackest
  5. wracketh
  6. wrackful
  7. wracking
  8. wracking one's brain
  9. wrackingly
  10. wrackline
  11. wracklines

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wrackful (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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