Word of the Day

: August 8, 2024

fusty

adjective FUSS-tee

What It Means

Someone or something described as fusty is rigidly old-fashioned. Fusty is also used as a synonym of musty to describe things that are full of dust and unpleasant, stale odors.

// Wanda is quick to admit that the music she prefers is fusty, as it excludes pretty much anything recorded after 1960.

// The trunk in the attic was full of fusty old clothes that smelled like mothballs.

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fusty in Context

“One of the great joys of Paris is its wealth of niche museums, and there’s nowhere greater—or more atmospheric—in that regard than the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, the museum of hunting and nature.... The deliciously macabre displays of taxidermy are a highlight, but the museum also manages to avoid feeling too fusty by bringing in contemporary artists to produce works in conversation with its collections, from Sterling Ruby to Jeff Koons.” — Liam Hess, Vogue, 27 Sept. 2023

Did You Know?

A long and winish road led fusty to English’s door. While that road is a bit obscured, evidence suggests that fusty comes from the Middle English noun foist, meaning “wine cask,” which in turn traces back to the Medieval Latin word fustis, meaning “tree trunk” or “wood.” Fusty itself originally described wine that had gone stale from sitting in the cask too long; fusty literally meant that the wine had the “taste of the cask.” Eventually, fusty was used across the culinary universe for any stale food, and especially for damp or moldy food. Those damp and moldy connotations later led fusty to be applied to musty places, and later still to anything that had lost its freshness and interest—that is, to anything old-fashioned.