rusty

Marked or corroded by rust.

Adjective

  1. Marked or corroded by rust.
  2. Of the rust color, reddish or reddish-brown.
    • 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; - 1855, Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, section XIV:
    • 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...
  3. Lacking recent experience, out of practice, especially with respect to a skill or activity.
    • 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. - 2010 December 29, Sam...
  4. Of clothing, especially dark clothing: worn, shabby.
    • He wore a black jacket, rusty and amorphous. - 1911, Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson:
    • The clerk stared at him and the rusty black bonnet a moment, and then laughed. - 1908 October, Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC:
  5. Affected with the fungal plant disease called rust.

Origin

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”).

Forms

rustier rustiest

Hyponyms

aeruginous

Derived

better than a poke in the eye with a rusty nail nonrusty ride rusty rustily rustiness Rusty rustyback rusty blackbird rusty dusty rusty guts rustyhood rustyish rusty-margined guan rusty nail rusty pitohui rusty sheriff's badge rusty-spotted cat rusty thicketbird rusty tinamou rusty trombone turn rusty unrusty

Adjective Entry 2

  1. Discolored and rancid; reasty.
    • rusty bacon
  2. Cantankerous
    • But they paraded the street, and watched the yard till dusk, when its proprietor ran rusty and turned them out. - 1864, Charles Reade, Very Hard Cash:

Origin

Variant form of resty; compare also reasty.

Forms

more rusty most rusty

Noun

  1. A gun or in particular an old or worn one.
    • My angles dusty, two black hands on the rusty And I got uck from a peng ting, mad back but the chest busty - 2014 August 25, Dimzy of 67, “Outside”, 1:29–1:35:

Origin

Ellipsis of rusty one more often used for this, or from the general epithet rusty given to various particular firearm names—earlier both were applied in Cockney rhyming slang for other machines, including swords in their day, but the present coinage has not more than a loose connection to this and is from the preference for used or antique firearms due to their being easier or cheaper to obtain.