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Etymology
Origin of swampy
Explanation
Something that's swampy is very wet and soggy, like a swampy baseball field after four days of heavy rain. Something swampy resembles a swamp, a wetland where trees, shrubs, and other plants grow. The "wetland" part is what's important when it comes to this adjective, which you can use for sloppy, squishy places that get your feet really wet. That park won't work for croquet — the grass is so swampy! Swampy can also describe literal swamps: "Cypress trees grow in the swampy areas of Louisiana bordering the Mississippi River."
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:
So let’s dive, Scrooge McDuck–style, into the swampy details.
From Slate ● Jul. 1, 2026
Mbappé went on his scoring binge first, in the swampy Meadowlands.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 17, 2026
Algae have proliferated in the water, turning it a swampy green.
From Barron's ● Jun. 16, 2026
For decades these swampy trees had been declining rapidly as they were cleared for fish farms and housing.
From BBC ● Jun. 4, 2026
The trip to the kitchen and back could not have taken more than two minutes, yet in that time I tramped through swampy cemeteries, climbed over dusty gravestones and eluded litters of night-black cats.
From "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou
“Phytophthora thrives on these humid, moist, kind of swampier sites. Unfortunately, that is the kind of problem that's kind of creeping up into our region as things start to warm up.”
From Salon ● Dec. 18, 2023
But the opposite is true, so he depends on a foil who flatters him, a fork in the road that he can portray as rockier and swampier.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 26, 2017
In the early 1970s, Dr. Brisbin was employed checking out the wildlife on the periphery of the plant and often came upon these wild dogs in the swampier parts of his domain.
From New York Times ● Jul. 15, 2013
As the forest became wetter and swampier, she had to avoid stepping into still, black pools that looked like shadows.
From Anya and the Dragon by Sofiya Pasternack
Kyushu would have seemed a paradise to Korean rice farmers, because it is warmer and swampier than Korea and hence a better place to grow rice.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
In the swampiest of swamps, “strategic communications” obviously pays.
From Washington Post ● Feb. 11, 2020
This war had led us from the comparative civilisation of German plantations to the wildest, swampiest region of Equatorial Africa.
From Sketches of the East Africa Campaign by Robert Valentine Dolbey
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.
