1 [U] small pieces of rubbish/garbage such as paper, cans and bottles, that people have left lying in a public place:
There will be fines for people who drop litter.
2 [sing.] ~ of sth a number of things that are lying in an untidy way:
The floor was covered with a litter of newspapers, clothes and empty cups.
3 [U] a dry substance that is put in a shallow open box for pets, especially cats, to use as a toilet when they are indoors:
cat litter * (BrE) a litter tray * (AmE) a litter box
4 [C] a number of baby animals that one mother gives birth to at the same time:
a litter of puppies / kittens * the runt (= the smallest and weakest baby) of the litter
5 [U] the substance, especially STRAW, that is used for farm animals to sleep on
6 [C] a kind of chair or bed that was used in the past for carrying important people
Part of speech: verb
1 [VN] to be spread around a place, making it look untidy:
Piles of books and newspapers littered the floor. * Broken glass littered the streets.
2 ~ (sth) (with sth) [usuallypassive] to leave things in a place, making it look untidy:
[VN] The floor was littered with papers. * [V] (AmE) He was arrested for littering.
3 [VN] (be littered with sth) to contain or involve a lot of a particular type of thing usually sth bad:
Your essay is littered with spelling mistakes.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for litter is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is litter a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, litter is tagged as noun.
Does litter appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — litter appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
