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rusty

adjectivenounadjectivecommon in dialogue

  • //ˈɹʌsti//

Marked or corroded by rust.

adjective

  1. 1

    Marked or corroded by rust.

    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.

  2. 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;

    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.

  3. 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.

  4. 4

    historicalOf clothing, especially dark clothing: worn, shabby.

    He wore a black jacket, rusty and amorphous.

    The clerk stared at him and the rusty black bonnet a moment, and then laughed.

  5. 5

    Affected with the fungal plant disease called rust.

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”).

noun

  1. 1

    slangA 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

Etymology

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.

adjective

  1. 1

    Discolored and rancid; reasty.

    rusty bacon

  2. 2

    Cantankerous

    But they paraded the street, and watched the yard till dusk, when its proprietor ran rusty and turned them out.

Etymology

Variant form of resty; compare also reasty.

Forms

comparative
rustier, more rusty
superlative
rustiest, most rusty
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).