Corruption may refer to:

• Putrefaction, the decomposition of recently-living matter. Other meanings of the term use this as a metaphor.
• Political corruption, the dysfunction of a political system or institution in which government officials, political officials or employees seek illegitimate personal gain through actions such as bribery, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, patronage, graft, and embezzlement.
• Political corruption is a specific form of rent seeking (not to be confused with property rental), where access to politics is restricted by limited transparency, limited competition and domination of narrow interests.
• Corporate corruption, the abuse of power by corporate managers against shareholders or consumers.
• Data corruption, an unintended change to data in storage or in transit.
• Linguistic corruption, the change in meaning to a language or a text introduced by cumulative errors in transcription as changes in the language speakers' comprehension.