Wasty
adj ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Resembling a waste or wasteland; desert; (by extension) deserted, desolate.
"But, happily, we meet with circumstances that break in upon this routine and monotony, and we thank God, as Mungo Park did, when the moss peeped up at him from the wasty desert."
- 2 Containing or yielding much waste.
- 3 Deteriorating, wasting away.
"This fruit was well packed and nicely graded, but unfortunately a wasty condition prevented satisfactory prices being obtained."
- 4 Obese; excessively fat.
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- 5 Resembling cotton-waste (the leftover cotton fibers from manufacturing and post-consumer sources that can be recycled into new products). US
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- 6 Wasteful. dated
Synonyms
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More examples"But, happily, we meet with circumstances that break in upon this routine and monotony, and we thank God, as Mungo Park did, when the moss peeped up at him from the wasty desert."
Etymology
From Middle English wasti, westy, westi, westiȝ (“desolate, deserted; destitute”), from Old English wēstiġ (“wasty, desert, desolate”), from Proto-West Germanic *wōstīg (“waste-like, deserted”), equivalent to waste + -y. Cognate with Scots wasty, waisty (“desolate, deserted; unoccupied”), Dutch woestig (“inhospitable, rugged, wild”), German Low German wööstig (“desolate”).
From Middle English wasty (“extravagantly or wastefully expensive”), equivalent to waste + -y.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.