rotten apple
A bad individual among many good ones, especially one that spoils the group. For example, The roommates are having problems with Edith—she's the one rotten apple of the bunch. This expression is a shortening of the proverb a rotten apple spoils the barrel, coming from a 14th-century Latin proverb translated as “The rotten apple injures its neighbors.” The allusion in this idiom is to the spread of mold or other diseases from one apple to the rest. In English the first recorded use was in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack (1736).
Words Nearby rotten apple
The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
How to use rotten apple in a sentence
This is no isolated incident, no "one rotten apple in the barrel."
She was upborne by the thought that it would be a relief to him not to see anything like a rotten apple.
Grisly Grisell | Charlotte M. YongeThey say she has a face like a cankered oak gall or a rotten apple lying cracked on the ground among the wasps.
Grisly Grisell | Charlotte M. YongeBut he was pretty well all alone; there's got to be a rotten apple in the best-picked barrel and these boys were smart.
The Man Who Played to Lose | Laurence Mark JaniferThere is as much difference between the bankers of London and bankers in Paris, as between a rotten apple and a sound one.
A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) | Philip Thicknesse
We should no more eat bad grain than a rotten apple, or putrefying meat.
Health on the Farm | H. F. Harris
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