Very miserable; sunk in, or accompanied by, deep affliction or distress, as from want, anxiety, or grief; calamitous; woeful; very afflicting.
The word wretched is correct and usable in written English. You can use it to describe a person, place, thing, or situation that is very unpleasant or desperate. Example sentence: After a long day of work, she felt wretched and exhausted.
Villa then embarked on a wretched run of two wins in 21 matches, plummeting down the table and stinking the place out with a strain of football that yielded an average of less than half a goal per Premier League game.
In the third chapter of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon gave two reasons why the slavery into which the Romans had tumbled under Augustus and his successors left them more wretched than any previous human slavery.
Over glasses of water in a Philippine cafe in a Doha suburba populated by migrant workers, the women laid bare their wretched six-month odyssey, which has left them on the brink of despair and repatriation.
Yet we've long run out of descriptors for the light-socket hairdo made famous by wretched, slimy, reptilian boxing promoter Don King.
I went for a short walk to the shops yesterday, and in just those few minutes I bumped into two people worrying intensely about how to get everyone to vote Labour, and what hell it will be if the wretched Tories get in again.
Then there is its American, dear-god-hide-it-in-the-attic sibling, a wretched creature offering a mere 34g of satisfaction.
The film was called La Haine (Hate) and was the story of three young men in one of the wretched housing projects outside Paris, commonly referred to as la banlieue.
Being a terminologist, I care about word choice. Ludwig simply helps me pick the best words for any translation. Five stars!
Maria Pia Montoro
Terminologist and Q/A Analyst @ Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union