rusty.
Marked or corroded by rust.
Meaning & usage
Marked or corroded by rust.
Of the rust color, reddish or reddish-brown.
Lacking recent experience, out of practice, especially with respect to a skill or activity.
Of clothing, especially dark clothing: worn, shabby.
Affected with the fungal plant disease called rust.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English rusty, from Old English rūstiġ (“rusty”), from Proto-Germanic *rustagaz (“rusty”), equivalent to rust + -y. Cognate with Saterland Frisian rusterch (“rusty”), West Frisian rustich, roastich (“rusty”), Dutch roestig (“rusty”), German Low German rusterig, rüsterig (“rusty”), German rostig (“rusty”), Swedish rostig (“rusty”).
A gun or in particular an old or worn one.
Where this word comes from
Ellipsis of rusty one more often used for this, or from the general epithet rusty given to various particular firearm names—earlier both were applied in Cockney rhyming slang for other machines, including swords in their day, but the present coinage has not more than a loose connection to this and is from the preference for used or antique firearms due to their being easier or cheaper to obtain.
Discolored and rancid; reasty.
rusty bacon
Cantankerous
Where this word comes from
Variant form of resty; compare also reasty.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.