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:
BATURAJA, Indonesia—Marching down a dusty trail lined with elephant grass, First Lt.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 3, 2026
Her memories of favorite foods has remained intact, like images preserved in a dusty family album.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 23, 2026
It is still orbiting within its young star's dusty disk, giving scientists a rare opportunity to study planet formation while it is still happening.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 17, 2026
Satellite imagery over the Atlantic on Wednesday 9 September shows a large, brown and hazy area which is a dry, dusty later in the atmosphere moving toward the US.
From BBC ● Sep. 10, 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
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
If that conclusion is confirmed, it suggests the early universe was much dustier than previously thought.
From Science Daily ● Dec. 1, 2023
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
It was smaller than I had expected—as places reconstructed from borrowed memories inevitably are—but also duller and dustier.
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
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.
