WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4

Fusty

[fəs-tee]Part of speech: adjective

Origin: french, late 15th century

Smelling stale, damp, or stuffy.
Old-fashioned in attitude or style.

Examples of Fusty in a sentence

Please open the windows in your room, because it's starting to smell fusty.
The substitute teacher has a fusty reputation.

About Fusty

Aged wine is certainly desirable, but fusty has also come to mean anything old-fashioned, tired, and stale. The original aged meaning holds, but the additional connotation can apply literally to old and moldy food, and also figuratively in the personality department.

Did you Know?

Fusty might sound like a word made up to serve as a rhyme of dusty, but it has an enological (relating to wine) origin. The Old French word "fuste" means smelling of the cask. So if you've ever been in a wine cellar and smelled the particular aroma of aging wine, that's fusty.