Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Smelling of mildew or decay; musty.
  • adjective Old-fashioned; antique.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Moldy; musty; ill-smelling; rank; rancid.
  • Moping.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Moldy; musty; ill-smelling; rank.
  • adjective Archaic Moping.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Moldy or musty.
  • adjective stale-smelling or stuffy.
  • adjective figuratively, by extension old-fashioned, refusing to change or update.
  • adjective of wine Tasting of the cask.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective old-fashioned and out of date
  • adjective stale and unclean smelling

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old French fust, piece of wood, wine cask, from Latin fūstis, stick, club.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Old French fust ("cask") (modern French fût), from Latin fustis ("a cudgel")

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Examples

  • The stem snapped in half years ago, and its case is worn, but it still exudes a kind of fusty dignity.

    The uneasy namesake Manuel Roig-Franzia 2011

  • It's become a kind of fusty shtick it conjures up the voices of Carl Kasell and Charles Osgood.

    Haiku Takes To Twitter, 140 Characters At A Time 2010

  • It's become a kind of fusty shtick it conjures up the voices of Carl Kasell and Charles Osgood.

    Haiku Takes To Twitter, 140 Characters At A Time 2010

  • Weds Letters), I would suggest the expression for responding to a post, when even as you're writing, you suspect they just put it there to provoke the kind of fusty response you're now drafting, but you're just too pedantic to stop yourself commenting, should be known as post-imprissionism.

    BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition 2009

  • Weds Letters), I would suggest the expression for responding to a post, when even as you're writing, you suspect they just put it there to provoke the kind of fusty response you're now drafting, but you're just too pedantic to stop yourself commenting, should be known as post-imprissionism.

    BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition 2009

  • It affected families too: I had one grandfather at Pearl for the duration as a radio operator while my paternal grandfather, an engineer, no sooner had a rare beer on V-E Day (he was a fusty old lower-middle-class Southern Baptist bigot, a charming grandfather and good with kids, but those other things too in a run of trumps) than he got to spend an extra year in the service rebuilding infrastructure in the Philippines.

    Where we won the War we started by almost losing it 2010

  • It was important to me to demonstrate this, because I anticipated correctly that there'd be a slew of fusty cultural critics -- crushing bores all -- who would clutch their pearls and frantically decry Stewart/Colbert's efforts as "unserious."

    'Rally To Restore Sanity' Critics Unite To Offer America Pretentious Whining The Huffington Post News Team 2010

  • It was important to me to demonstrate this, because I anticipated correctly that there'd be a slew of fusty cultural critics -- crushing bores all -- who would clutch their pearls and frantically decry Stewart/Colbert's efforts as "unserious."

    'Rally To Restore Sanity' Critics Unite To Offer America Pretentious Whining Jason Linkins 2010

  • It was important to me to demonstrate this, because I anticipated correctly that there'd be a slew of fusty cultural critics -- crushing bores all -- who would clutch their pearls and frantically decry Stewart/Colbert's efforts as "unserious."

    'Rally To Restore Sanity' Critics Unite To Offer America Pretentious Whining The Huffington Post News Team 2010

  • It was important to me to demonstrate this, because I anticipated correctly that there'd be a slew of fusty cultural critics -- crushing bores all -- who would clutch their pearls and frantically decry Stewart/Colbert's efforts as "unserious."

    'Rally To Restore Sanity' Critics Unite To Offer America Pretentious Whining The Huffington Post News Team 2010

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