waste away
"waste-away" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“waste away” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 10
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To lose energy or become weak and feeble.
Corpus desk
Index EN-waste-away · waste away · English
waste away · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 10 letters
- VOW-5 5 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "W" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | waste away |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “waste away” in English
Rare enough to double-check
waste away is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "To lose energy or become weak and feeble.".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for waste away, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.
No documented word history exists for this headword, so its spelling pattern is best understood through pronunciation rather than a traceable origin. The correct English form is waste away, spelled W-A-S-T-E- -A-W-A-Y.
Definition
- 1To lose energy or become weak and feeble.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how waste away appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
She watched him waste away from lack of food or exercise.
The perennial Arctic ice cap—the sea ice that persists through winter and summer—is wasting away. Over the past half century it has shrunk by more than a million square miles
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.