sooty
Americanadjective
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covered, blackened, or smirched with soot.
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consisting of or resembling soot.
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of a black, blackish, or dusky color.
adjective
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covered with soot
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resembling or consisting of soot
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of sooty
Middle English word dating back to 1200–50; see origin at soot, -y 1
Explanation
After a harsh winter, the chimney of a frequently used fireplace might be especially sooty, covered in dark ashes from all of the fires that burned within. Sooty describes anything coated with or similar to soot — the fine, black particles produced by burning organic matter like wood or coal. Sooty surfaces can be messy and difficult to clean, and they often signal incomplete combustion or pollution. In stories, characters with sooty faces or clothes might be chimney sweeps or coal miners. The word can also be used to describe particularly dark shades of black.
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:
He said that in New Zealand sooty shearwater, also known as muttonbirds, were traditionally hunted on Rakiura, which is also known as Stewart Island.
From BBC ● Aug. 3, 2026
“Smog” is a turn-of-the-century portmanteau word mashing together “smoke” and “fog” to describe the sooty, sulfurous air of the London of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 26, 2026
Malick Diop grew up in Senegal in a thatched-roof hut with a dirt floor, sooty walls and roaming goats.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 11, 2026
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, typing to you from underneath a sooty, icy snow boulder that has covered the entirety of D.C. for a week.
From Slate ● Jan. 31, 2026
He stood at the threshold, snow caught in his windblown hair and sooty lashes, his face flushed from the cold.
From "The City Beautiful" by Aden Polydoros
However, reality wears a graver face and a sootier one.
From Biltmore Oswald The Diary of a Hapless Recruit by Dick Dorgan
She was small, not more than fifteen hundred or two thousand tons, and the dingiest, sootiest of all tramp freighters.
From Harrigan by Max Brand
He was a miner, of course, for he was dressed in mine clothes, and was as begrimed as the sootiest delver of them all, but who was he?
From Derrick Sterling A Story of the Mines by Kirk Monroe
A Santa Claus that had any bowels of compassion would rush down the narrowest and sootiest chimney in the world to give me my simple wishes.
From Marm Lisa by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
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.
