Link Centre Dictionary

seedy

UK/ˈsiːdi/ US/ˈsidi/ uncommon

adjective

1.

full of seeds

  • “as seedy as a fig”
Antonyms
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2.

shabby and untidy

  • “a surge of ragged scruffy children”
  • “he was soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin” Mark Twain
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3.

morally degraded

  • “a seedy district”
  • “the seamy side of life”
  • “sleazy characters hanging around casinos”
  • “sleazy storefronts with...dirt on the walls” Seattle Weekly
  • “the sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils” James Joyce
  • “the squalid atmosphere of intrigue and betrayal”
Synonyms
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4.

weak and feeble

  • “I”
Synonyms
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Origin

From Middle English sedy, equivalent to seed + -y. The senses with negative connotation, first attested by 1725 in slang, originally especially “poor, out of money”, probably arose from the metaphor of a flower that has gone to seed, and is no longer considered beautiful. From there the word came to be used to describe unwell or past-their-prime people, and parallelly run-down places and by extension low-income or crime-affected urban areas. Compare the figurative expressions go to seed (by 1817), etc., originally in reference to plants, “cease flowering as seeds develop”.

Phrases

  • seedy toe

WordNet 2.1 (Princeton University). Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved. Wiktionary content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.