corruptionnoun/kəˈɹʌpʃən/

• 1

  The act of corrupting or of impairing integrity, virtue, or moral principle; the state of being corrupted or debased; loss of purity or integrity.

  • It was necessary, by exposing the gross corruptions of monasteries, […] to exite popular indignation against them.
  • They abstained from some of the worst methods of corruption usual to their party in its earlier days.
• 2

  The act of corrupting or making putrid, or state of being corrupt or putrid; decomposition or disorganization, in the process of putrefaction; putrefaction; deterioration.

  • The inducing and accelerating of putrefaction is a subject of very universal inquiry; for corruption is a reciprocal to generation.
• 3

  The product of corruption; putrid matter.

  • Think of wandering amid sepulchral ruins, of stumbling over the bones of the dead, of encountering what I cannot describe,—the horror of being among those who are neither the living or the dead;—those dark and shadowless things that sport themselves with the reliques of the dead, and feast and love amid corruption,—ghastly, mocking, and terrific.
• 4

  The decomposition of biological matter.

• 5

  Unethical administrative or executive practices (in government or business), including bribery (offering or receiving bribes), conflicts of interest, nepotism, embezzlement, and so on.

• 6

  computingengineeringmathematicsThe destruction of data by manipulation of parts of it, either by deliberate or accidental human action or by imperfections in storage or transmission media.

  • The idea of having a time lag is to allow for situations when a corruption of some type affects the source server. If a corruption occurs, you do not want it to replicate to the copy of the database, so the time lag gives administrators the opportunity to recognize that a problem exists and then to have the ability to switch from the database copy if the corruption is so bad that it renders the original database unusable.
• 7

  The act of changing, or of being changed, for the worse; departure from what is pure, simple, or correct.

  • a corruption of style
  • corruption of innocence
• 8

  A nonstandard form of a word, expression, or text, especially when resulting from misunderstanding, transcription error, or mishearing. (See a usage note about this sense.)

  • The affix ty, like té, Fr., ta, It., dad, Sp., is a corruption of the Latin affix tas, tat, and Greek tes; as bounty, bonté, Fr., bonta, It., bondad, Sp., bonitas from bonus, good; vanity, vanité, Fr., vanita, It., vanidad, Sp, vanitas from vanus, vain.
  • The estate is called Carfax, no doubt a corruption of the old Quatre Face, as the house is four-sided, agreeing with the cardinal points of the compass.