rusty
/ˈɹʌsti/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.61 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
2
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Of the rust color, reddish or reddish-brown.
adj
Lacking recent experience, out of practice, especially with respect to a skill or activity.
adj
Affected with the fungal plant disease called rust.
adj
Discolored and rancid; reasty.
Example Sentences
- "The overall mood of this volume is one of melancholy and loss, weary resignation to one's lot—trudging round and round on the rusty hamster wheel of life."
- "Alive? he might be dead for aught I know, / With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, / And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;"
- "Three chairs of the steamer type, all maimed, comprised the furniture of this roof-garden, with […] on one of the copings a row of four red clay flower-pots filled with sun-baked dust from which gnarled and rusty stalks thrust themselves up like withered elfin limbs."
- "Before the match, Hodgson had expressed the hope that his players would be fresh rather than rusty after an 18-day break from league commitments because of two successive postponements."
- "He wore a black jacket, rusty and amorphous."
- "The clerk stared at him and the rusty black bonnet a moment, and then laughed."
Etymology
From Middle English rusty, from Old English rūstiġ (“rusty”), from Proto-Germanic *rustagaz (“rusty”), equivalent to rust + -y. Cognate with Saterland Frisian rusterch (“rusty”), West Frisian rustich, roastich (“rusty”), Dutch roestig (“rusty”), German Low German rusterig, rüsterig (“rusty”), German rostig (“rusty”), Swedish rostig (“rusty”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: rusty, rūstiġ, *rustagaz
Usage
- Slang
- Uncountable
- British usage