Rife means widespread or commonly occurring, especially in a way that's troubling or excessive. When something is rife, there's too much of it, and it's showing up everywhere you look.

If a school playground is rife with rumors about who likes whom, those rumors are spreading rapidly and everyone seems to be talking about them. When a neighborhood is rife with potholes, you can't drive down a street without hitting one. A video game might be rife with bugs that make it crash or glitch constantly.

The word usually describes negative things: problems, mistakes, corruption, or disease. You wouldn't typically say a garden is rife with beautiful flowers. Instead, you might say it's rife with weeds. A poorly edited book might be rife with typos. During flu season, a classroom can become rife with illness as students pass germs back and forth.

Rife carries a sense that whatever it describes has gotten out of control or reached concerning levels. The problem exists everywhere and has become pervasive and hard to avoid. When historians describe a corrupt government as rife with bribery, they mean dishonesty has spread throughout the entire system, happening constantly rather than occasionally.