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Look up corruption in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Corruption is a general concept describing any organized, interdependent system in which part of the system is either not performing duties it was originally intended to, or performing them in an improper way, to the detriment of the system's original purpose.

Specific types of corruption include:

• Putrefaction or decomposition of recently living matter. This physical process is the primary model of the metaphorical meaning of corruption, so advanced states of corruption in, e.g. a political structure are said to result in their putrefaction.
• Moral corruption refers to corruption of the mind that transcends the moral and ethical dictates and standards.
• Political corruption, dysfunctions of a political system or institution in which politically elected officials seek illegitimate personal gain through actions such as bribery, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, patronage, graft, and embezzlement. "Rent seeking" is a closely related term in economics.
• Bureaucratic corruption, relates to mainly to nepotism and pecuniary corruption by bureaucrats that pushes up the cost of functioning of public offices, penalizes the public exchequer or clients or both.
• Police corruption, a type of bureaucratic corruption that infects police departments, and includes misuse of authoirty in addition to bribery. Police mis-conduct is a closley associated phenomenon.
• Data corruption, the receiving of data which is different from that which was transmitted or otherwise intended.
• Corruption (linguistics) of language or a text into a broken form or a different meaning.
• Tempting a mind to do immoral things, e.g. corrupting the youth.

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