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''bastard'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260320113731-00-⌔

bastard - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

bastard (countable and uncountable, plural bastards)

  • (dated) A person who was born out of wedlock, and hence often considered an illegitimate descendant.
    • ✤ Synonyms: love child, born in the vestry, illegitimate; see also Thesaurus: bastard
    • ✤ * Jarrod: Who are you?
      Heath: Your father’s bastard son.*1
  • A mongrel (biological cross between different breeds, groups or varieties).
  • (vulgar, offensive or derogatory, usually referring specifically to a man) A contemptible, inconsiderate, overly or arrogantly rude or spiteful person.
    • ✤ Synonyms: son of a bitch, arsehole, asshole; see also Thesaurus: git, Thesaurus: jerk
    • ✤ Some bastard stole my car while I was helping an injured person.
    • ✤ *You sick bastard! *
    • ✤ Don’t be such a bastard already!
    • ✤ I assume that bastard won’t be seen again.
    • ✤ “Oh my God, they killed Kenny!” “You bastards!”2
  • (endearing or humorous) A man, a fellow, a male friend.
    • ✤ *lucky bastard *
    • ✤ *funny bastard *
    • ✤ Get over here, you old bastard!
  • (often preceded by ‘poor’) A suffering person deemed deserving of compassion.
    • ✤ Poor bastard, I feel so sorry for him.
    • ✤ These poor bastards started out life probably in bad or broken homes.
  • (informal) A child who does not know their father.
  • (informal) Something extremely difficult or unpleasant to deal with.
    • ✤ Life can be a real bastard.
  • A variation that is not genuine; something irregular or inferior or of dubious origin, fake or counterfeit.
    • ✤ The architecture was a kind of bastard, suggesting Gothic but not being true Gothic.
    • ✤ There were also made good and politic laws that parliament, against usury, which is the bastard use of money…3
  • A bastard file.
  • A kind of sweet wine.
    • ✤ […] we ſhall haue all the world drinke browne & white baſtard.4
  • A sword that is midway in length between a short-sword and a long sword; also bastard sword.
  • An inferior quality of soft brown sugar, obtained from syrups that have been boiled several times.
  • A large mould for straining sugar.
  • A writing paper of a particular size.
    • ✤ Synonym: copy
  • (UK, politics, derogatory) A Eurosceptic Conservative MP, especially in the government of John Major.
    • ✤ If you are a politician, you make sure that you know all such references in case an interviewer suddenly asks, ‘Are you one of the bastards in Mr Major’s cabinet?’5
    • ✤ While John Major managed to get the Maastricht Treaty through parliament, despite the efforts of the “bastards” in his cabinet, the 2001 Conservative General Election campaign was fought on entirely eurosceptic lines.6
    • ✤ In the UK, Conservative Maastricht rebels (the ‘bastards’) almost brought down Conservative Prime Minister John Major’s government.7
    • ✤ One “bastard,” the Minister for Wales, John Redwood (who mounted an unsuccessful campaign to displace the Tory chief, John Major), was removed in a Cabinet reshuffle; but was his young successor William Hague any more reliable?8
    • ✤ But there is no doubt that the “bastards,” who had tormented so many Tory leaders over the years, had won. The longed-for break with “Europe” had finally come, but at the same price that Americans paid for Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party.9

Adjective

bastard (comparative more bastard, superlative most bastard)

  • Of or like a bastard (illegitimate human descendant).
  • Of or like a bastard (bad person).
  • Of or like a mongrel, bastardized creature/cross.
  • Of abnormal, irregular or otherwise inferior qualities (size, shape etc).
    • ✤ a bastard musket
    • ✤ a bastard culverin
    • Spurious, lacking authenticity: counterfeit, fake.
      • ✤ that bastard self-love which is so vicious in itself, and productive of so many vices10
    • (of a language) Imperfect; not spoken or written well or in the classical style; broken.
      • ✤ Of what race could these people be? Their language was a bastard Arabic, and yet they were not Arabs; I was quite sure of that.11
  • Used in the vernacular name of a species to indicate that it is similar in some way to another species, often (but not always) one of another genus.
    • ✤ bastard gemsbok; bastard mahogany; bastard toadflax; bastard trumpeter
  • (UK, Ireland, vulgar) Very unpleasant.
    • ✤ I’ve got a bastard headache.
  • (printing) Abbreviated, as the half title in a page preceding the full title page of a book.
  • (theater lighting) Consisting of one predominant color blended with small amounts of complementary color; used to replicate natural light because of their warmer appearance.
    • ✤ A bastard orange gel produces predominantly orange light with undertones of blue.

Interjection

bastard!

  • (vulgar, rare) Exclamation of strong dismay or strong sense of being upset.
    • ✤ Jack says, “Oh! Bastard! I’m hit!” That bullet had to have come in the busted back window and how it missed Johnnie to hit Jack I don’t know.12
    • ✤ “Yes, I’m hhhhowwwwwwcch!” she yelped as she stubbed her toe against the bedpost. “Shit, shit, fuck, bastard, shit, crap!”13
    • ✤ “Isn’t she lovely?” Clem asks, hopefully rhetorically. “Oh, bastard. I’ve got to go—that’s my signal. […]”14

Verb

bastard (third-person singular simple present bastards, present participle bastarding, simple past and past participle bastarded)

  • (obsolete) To bastardize.
    • ✤ After her husband’s death she was matter of tragedy, having lived to see her brother beheaded, and her two sons deposed from the crown, bastarded in their blood15

Etymology

🖼️ ➺

From Middle English bastard, bastarde, from Old English bastard (used as an epithet), from Anglo-Norman bastard, Old French bastart (“illegitimate child”), perhaps via Medieval Latin bastardus, of obscure origin.

Likely from Frankish ﹡bāst (“marriage, relationship”) + Old French -ard, -art (pejorative suffix denoting a specific quality or condition). Frankish ﹡bāst derives from a North Sea Germanic variety of Proto-Germanic ﹡banstuz (“bond, connection, relationship, marriage with a second woman of lower status”), from Proto-Indo-European ﹡bʰendʰ- (“to tie, bind”) and is related to West Frisian boaste (“marriage, matrimony”), Middle Dutch bast (“lust, heat”), and more distantly to English boose (“cow-stall”). The term probably originally referred to a child from a polygynous marriage of heathen Germanic custom — a practice not sanctioned by the Christian churches.

Alternatively, and probably less likely, Old French bastart may have originated from the Old French term fils de bast (“packsaddle son”), meaning a child conceived on an improvised bed (medieval saddles often doubled as beds while travelling). However chronology makes this difficult, as bastard is attested in Old French from 1089 (Middle Latin bastardus as early as 1010), yet Old French bast (modern French bât), though attested since 1130 with the meaning of “beast of burden”, doesn’t acquire the specific meaning of “packsaddle” until the 13c., making it too late to have given rise to the terms bastard and bastardus with this sense. The French Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales supports the Germanic theory further above as being most likely.16

Pronunciation

  • (UK)
    • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈbɑːs.təd/
    • (Northumbria) IPA: /ˈbæs.tæd/
  • (General American) IPA: /ˈbæs.tɚd/
  • Rhymes: -ɑːstə(ɹ)d, -æstə(ɹ)d

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1965, The Big Valley: ↩

  2. 1997, South Park television program: ↩

  3. 1622, Francis Bacon, Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry VII, Cambridge University Press, published 1902, page 62: ↩

  4. c. 1603–1604 (date written), William Shakespeare, “Measure for Measure”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene ii], page 72, column 2: ↩

  5. 2000, Peter Hobday, Managing the message, Allison & Busby: ↩

  6. 2011, Duncan Hall, A2 Government and Politics: Ideologies and Ideologies in Action, Lulu.com, →ISBN, page 62: ↩

  7. 2014 September 23, Stanley Johnson, Stanley, I Resume: Further recollections of an exuberant life, Biteback Publishing, →ISBN: ↩

  8. 2014, Melvin J. Lasky, Profanity, Obscenity and the Media, Transaction Publishers, →ISBN: ↩

  9. 2020 September 3, Ian Buruma, The Churchill Complex: The Rise and Fall of the Special Relationship from Winston and FDR to Trump and Johnson, Atlantic Books, →ISBN: ↩

  10. a. 1678 (date written), Isaac Barrow, “”, in The Works of Dr. Isaac Barrow. […], volume, London: A[braham] J[ohn] Valpy, […], published 1830–1831, →OCLC: ↩

  11. 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC: ↩

  12. 2001, Stephen King, “The Death of Jack Hamilton”, in Everything’s Eventual, Simon and Schuster, published 2007, →ISBN, page 90: ↩

  13. 2004, Cecelia Ahern, PS, I Love You, Hyperion, →ISBN, page 7: ↩

  14. 2006, Emily Franklin, Love from London, Penguin, →ISBN, page 212: ↩

  15. 1622, Francis, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Alban [i.e. Francis Bacon], The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh, […], London: […] W[illiam] Stansby for Matthew Lownes, and William Barret, →OCLC: ↩

  16. Etymology and history of “bâtard”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012 ↩

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