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:
By combining detailed computer simulations with recent images from ESA's Hera spacecraft, the researchers concluded that one impact could account for both the moon's large southern depression and its unusually smooth, dusty surface.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 26, 2026
In dusty streets teeming with men in camouflage and scattered with wrecked military vehicles she scours for scenes of normality to post on the city social media pages.
From Barron's ● Aug. 25, 2026
The Smithian doctrines of 1776 live mainly today between the covers of dusty books.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 21, 2026
“Poltergeist” was, notably, a summertime Amblin release that similarly riffed on classic creature scares — updating dusty, old ghost tropes with new ideas — much like Mitchell does with his dino-time-travel extravaganza.
From Salon ● Aug. 20, 2026
Eventually, she went to sleep with her arms around the sack of mealie meal and her nose buried in its dusty cloth.
From "A Girl Named Disaster" by Nancy Farmer
"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
Genie and Ernie stood frozen like two statues, one dustier than the other.
From "As Brave As You" by Jason Reynolds
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
"These sites are becoming dustier and dustier, and last year was by far the dustiest year of our study," Blakowski asserted in an interview with Salon.
From Salon ● Jul. 29, 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.
