Corruption means deterioration, the breakdown from a functioning, ordered state.

• Political corruption or civil corruption is expressed through bribery, intimidation, extortion, vote buying, destabilization, or influence peddling.
• Data corruption is the receiving of data which is different from that which was transmitted or otherwise intended. Error checking is usually used to prevent this.
• A corrupted society is a society with low moral values.
• A language or a text can be corrupted into a broken form or a different meaning.
• Parts of a machine can be corrupted, meaning broken.
• Corruption is used, especially poetically, to describe the decomposition of biological matter. This usage is archaic.