adjective
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covered with or involving dust
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like dust in appearance or colour
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(of a colour) tinged with grey; pale
dusty pink
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an unhelpful or bad-tempered reply
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informal not too bad; fairly well: often in response to the greeting how are you?
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
Etymology
Origin of dusty
Middle English word dating back to 1175–1225; see origin at dust, -y 1
Explanation
When you call something dusty, it's either literally covered in dust or so old and unoriginal that it might as well be. You can use a feather duster to clean off dusty surfaces, but if something is a dusty color, that just means it's got a grayish tint to it, like dusty pink or dusty blue. If something has been around for a really long time and it's worn-out, stale, or unoriginal, you can also call it dusty. If you're a stand up comedian whose been working the same act for thirty years, chances are your jokes are getting a little dusty.
Vocabulary lists containing dusty
Two-Faced Words: Contronyms
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Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"
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Florida's B.E.S.T. Common Suffixes: -y
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The rise of AI turned a dusty debate over South Korea’s label into one of the year’s biggest drivers of returns.
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 20, 2026
"Archives are only useful if we can get the information out of dusty drawers and into current research, teaching, and wider conversations," Newland added.
From BBC ● Jul. 20, 2026
Beginning with tobacco, they refitted the dusty doctrine as a battering ram and swung it at guns, lead paint, opioids and oil companies.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 19, 2026
They found it resides inside a dusty, gas rich galaxy undergoing an intense burst of star formation, providing new clues about the environments where the earliest supermassive black holes grew.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 9, 2026
I shake, settle my paws on this dry, dusty dirt.
From "Wayward Creatures" by Dayna Lorentz
"It would explain why these more massive supergiants are missing because they tend to be dustier."
From Science Daily ● Oct. 9, 2025
The other issue here is Verstappen was ahead at the apex, slightly, only because he had braked later than Norris, despite being on the dustier inside line where there would be less grip.
From BBC ● Oct. 22, 2024
As California’s largest lake has continued to evaporate, it’s become saltier and dustier, causing breathing problems for locals like Clark.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 6, 2024
The A clump is bluer, mostly free of dust and bursting with baby stars, whereas B is redder, dustier and comparatively lacking in new stars.
From Scientific American ● Jul. 11, 2023
A pretty good show, really, although it gets dustier every day It’s a mother, a father, two sisters, me, and a younger brother.
From "I Am the Messenger" by Markus Zusak
Astronomers posit that the most massive aging stars also might be the dustiest.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 9, 2025
Another Grann specialty is on full display — creating a cast of indelible characters from the dustiest of sources: 18th century ship’s logs, surgeons’ textbooks, court-martial proceedings.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 14, 2023
The bottom of my purse is the dustiest environment in the world, and I don’t love the main screen’s chances against my toddler if he ever got ahold of it.
From The Verge ● Aug. 17, 2022
As the public's interest in air quality grows, as evidenced by Purple Air's network of over 10,000 air quality monitoring devices, researchers are eager to identify the dustiest sources to inform policymakers.
From Salon ● Jan. 25, 2022
Grandpa loved the dustiest stores best because they were the ones that would have uncracked rolls of coins in the backs of their safes.
From "Fish in a Tree" by Lynda Mullaly Hunt
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
