Wretched means deeply miserable, pitiful, or of very poor quality. When someone feels wretched, they feel truly awful, perhaps sick with the flu, consumed by guilt, or overwhelmed by sadness. The word carries a sense of misery that goes beyond ordinary unhappiness.

You might feel wretched after betraying a friend's trust and realizing the hurt you caused. A character in a novel might live in wretched conditions, shivering in a cold, leaky shelter with barely enough to eat. The word can also describe terrible quality: a wretched performance means one so bad it's painful to watch.

In Charles Dickens's stories, wretched children live in poverty on London's streets, cold and hungry. When Ebenezer Scrooge encounters the wretched poor in A Christmas Carol, he sees people living in truly desperate circumstances.

The word implies intensity and extremity. Something wretched inspires pity or even disgust. If your team loses a game, you might feel disappointed, but if you played so poorly that you let everyone down, you might feel truly wretched about it.