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retard

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɹɪˈtɑːd//
  • United Kingdom/[ɹʷɪˈtʰɑːd]/
  • United States//ɹɪˈtɑɹd//
  • United States/[ɹʷɪˈtʰɑɹd]/

A retardation; a delay.

noun

  1. 1

    A retardation; a delay.

  2. 2

    A slowing down of the tempo; a ritardando.

  3. 3

    datedA person with mental retardation.

    The retard in our class needs special help.

  4. 4

    informalA person or being who is extremely stupid or slow to learn.

    “That's 'cause your dog is a retard,” the large woman retorted. The pit bull must have sensed the insult because it got up on all fours and started barking at the woman. Not one to back down from an interspecies fight, the prison lady stood up […]

    College freshman Scott Damerow set a new world record by using his head to bust 142 eggs and he now officially holds a place in the Guinness Book of Fucking Retards.

Etymology

From Middle English retarden, from Anglo-Norman retarder, from Latin retardō (“to retard”, from re- + tardus (“slow”)).

verb

  1. 1

    To keep delaying; to continue to hinder; to prevent from progressing.

    retard the march of an army

    retard the motion of a ship

  2. 2

    To put off; to postpone.

    to retard the attacks of old age

    to retard a rupture between nations

  3. 3

    obsoleteTo be slow or dilatory to perform (something).

  4. 4

    To decelerate; to slow down.

    70, 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, retard, retard...

    This application of hydraulics led Sir George Dowty to develop the wagon retarder system, which comprised small hydraulic rams mounted inside the rail. These rams could simply retard a wagon, or both retard and 'boost' or speed up a wagon by hydraulic pressure.

  5. 5

    obsoleteTo stay back.

    Some years it [The River Nile] hath also retarded, and come far later than usually it was expected

Forms

plural
retards
past tense
retarded
past participle
retarded
present participle
retarding
third person singular
retards
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).