dingy
Americanadjective
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of a dark, dull, or dirty color or aspect; lacking brightness or freshness.
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shabby; dismal.
adjective
-
lacking light or brightness; drab
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dirty; discoloured
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
Etymology
Origin of dingy
First recorded in 1730–40; origin uncertain
Explanation
If something is dingy, it's dirty. If you spend your days as a chimney sweeper, you probably look pretty dingy. The adjective dingy is often, but not always, used to describe one's clothing or living space. The adjective dingy comes from uncertain origins, but experts suspect it may be a backformation from the word dung, which is animal excrement. So you can imagine how dirty, dismal, grungy, and grimy something described as dingy is.
Vocabulary lists containing dingy
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"Everyday Use" by Alice Walker
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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 veil between this world and the next is so thin that Clark can literally walk right through it, from his dingy store into the familiar yellow dimension of the film’s opening sequence.
From Salon ● May 30, 2026
Maybe as the city seems to fall apart, she’ll find a leafy park or the back of a dingy bar that’s the right home for these strange, lonely yet hopeful songs.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 8, 2026
Roughly half a million people pass each day through this cramped, dingy catacomb beneath Madison Square Garden.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 22, 2026
They could end up nursing a grudge that they paid $200 a night for a space that resembles a dingy roadside motel rather than a boutique experience.
From MarketWatch ● Apr. 3, 2026
Her voice seemed to come from her knees, from the dingy floor of their cafeteria, gaining more and more power until finally exploding from her mouth.
From "We'll Fly Away" by Bryan Bliss
A delay in getting new rail cars could push back Metro’s expansion and leave passengers stuck with the dingier older cars as hundreds of thousands of people descend on the region for the Games.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 16, 2024
Manhattan has dressing rooms dingier than the one in the basement of the Actors Temple Theater.
From New York Times ● Nov. 2, 2023
Knowles pointed out other upgrades: He airbrushed the paint job on the siding to make it look dingier.
From Seattle Times ● Dec. 14, 2021
Your clothes “are dingier from when you started washing them until now. It’s happening a little bit at a time. Because you didn’t sort at all, everything becomes abraded.”
From Washington Post ● Aug. 16, 2021
Caroline had tried to make the sweatshirts more appealing by sewing large Santas, bordered with glitter, on the fronts, but this only made the dingy cotton seem dingier.
From "Educated" by Tara Westover
Even when the setting is at its dingiest, its directors Thor Freudenthal and Jon Amiel draw the eye to the beauty in the muck, making the loveliest scenes glow all the richer.
From Salon ● Aug. 29, 2019
That’s just over $10 a day for everything — in one of the world’s most expensive cities, where the tiniest and dingiest rooms start renting $400 a month.
From Time ● Jun. 21, 2016
The BBC visited the workshop of Graham Cox to see how he brings colour and light to the dingiest of corners.
From BBC ● Mar. 23, 2016
It's by far the smallest and dingiest outlet in the chain: The carpet is beige and worn, the ceilings are low, the lights fluorescent.
From BusinessWeek ● Jan. 20, 2011
Ahead of us floats an ancient, aluminum-patched, twin-screw tramp of the dingiest, with no more right to the 5,000 foot lane than has a horse-cart to a modern town.
From With The Night Mail A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) by Leyendecker, Frank X.
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.
