waste

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• intransitive verb To use, consume, spend, or expend thoughtlessly or carelessly.
• intransitive verb To cause to lose energy, strength, or vigor; exhaust, tire, or enfeeble.
• intransitive verb To fail to take advantage of or use for profit; lose.
• intransitive verb To destroy completely.
• intransitive verb Slang To kill; murder.
• intransitive verb To lose energy, strength, weight, or vigor; become weak or enfeebled.
• intransitive verb To pass without being put to use.
• noun The act or an instance of wasting or the condition of being wasted.
• noun A place, region, or land that is uninhabited or uncultivated; a desert or wilderness.
• noun A devastated or destroyed region, town, or building; a ruin.
• noun An unusable or unwanted substance or material, such as a waste product.
• noun Something, such as steam, that escapes without being used.
• noun Garbage; trash.
• noun The undigested residue of food eliminated from the body; excrement.
• adjective Regarded or discarded as worthless or useless.
• adjective Used as a conveyance or container for refuse.
• adjective Excreted from the body.
• idiom (waste (one's) breath) To gain or accomplish nothing by speaking.

from The Century Dictionary.

• In stone-cutting, to take off projecting irregularities of, as in preparing the stone for crating and transportation. Usually with off.
• noun In physical geography, detritus derived by the superficial disintegration of rock-masses and in process of removal by transporting agencies; rock-waste.
• Desert; desolate; uninhabited.
• In a state of desolation and decay; ruined; ruinous; blank; cheerless; dismal; dreary.
• Unused; untilled; unproductive.
• Rejected as unfit for use, or spoiled in the using; refuse; hence, of little or no value; useless: as, waste paper; waste materials.
• Idle; empty; vain; of no value or significance.
• Exuberant; over-abundant; hence, super-fluous; useless.
• Wasteful; prodigal; profuse.
• To cudgel.
• noun An old spelling of waist.
• noun A wild, uninhabited, or desolate place or region; a desert; a wilder ness.
• noun Unfilled or uncultivated ground; a tract of land not in a state of cultivation, and producing little or no herbage or wood.
• noun In coal-mining, gob; also, the fine coal made in mining and preparing coal for the market; culm; coal-dirt; dirt: in the Pennsylvania an thracite region, used to signify both the mine-waste (or coal left in the mine in pillars, etc.) and the breaker waste.
• noun Gradual loss, diminution, or decay, as in bulk, substance, strength, or value, from continued use, wear, disease, etc.: as, waste of tissue; waste of energy.
• noun Consumption; decline; a pining away.
• noun Broken, spoiled, useless, or superfluous material; stuff that is left over, or that is unfitted or cannot readily be utilized for the purpose for which it was intended; overplus, useless, or rejected material; refuse, as the overflow water from a dam or reservoir, broken or spoiled castings in a foundry, paper scraps in a printing-office or bindery, or shreds of yarn in a cotton- or woolen-mill.
• noun Rubbish; trash; nonsense.
• noun A weir or sluice for carrying off the over flow from a dam, reservoir, or canal.
• noun A waste-pipe, or any contrivance for allowing waste matter or surplus water, steam, etc., to escape.
• noun Unnecessary or useless expenditure: as, waste of time, labor, or money.
• noun A superfluity.
• noun In law, anything suffered by a tenant in the nature of permanent injury to the inheritance, not occasioned by the act of God or a public enemy; the result of any act or omission by the tenant of a particular estate by which the estate of the remainder-man or reversioner is rendered less valuable.
• noun Synonyms Refuse, Damage, etc. See loss.
• To lay waste; devastate; destroy; ruin.
• In law, to damage, injure, or impair, as an estate, voluntarily, or by allowing the build ings, fences, etc., to fail into decay.
• To diminish or reduce in bulk, substance, strength, value, or the like, as by continued use, wear, loss, decay, or disease; consume or wear away; use up; spend.
• To expend without adequate return; spend uselessly, vainly, or foolishly; employ or use lavishly, prodigally, improvidently, or carelessly; squander; throw away.
• Synonyms To ravage, pillage, plunder, strip.
• To dissipate, fritter away.