The abuse of entrusted power, especially public power, for private gain — bribery, embezzlement, kickbacks, the buying of justice — an ancient and universal vice whose core is condemned almost everywhere but whose boundary with ordinary favor, gift, patronage, and influence shifts from one culture and era to the next; a rot that diverts money from schools and hospitals, distorts justice and markets, falls hardest on the poor, and at its worst kills.
An apartment block in a growing city pancakes in an earthquake that the building next door survives. The inspector who signed off on the cut-rate concrete had been paid to look away. This is corruption at its sharpest: not a victimless transaction between consenting officials, but a betrayal of public trust that here ends in burials. The textbook definition is clean — the abuse of entrusted power for private gain — and the worst cases are clear to almost everyone. Yet the edges blur fast. A gift to an official, a job for a cousin, a donation to a campaign, a lobbyist's quiet lunch: one society calls these corruption, another calls them courtesy, kinship, or politics as usual. The hardest thing about corruption is that everyone names it and no one can quite agree where it ends.