English Reference
Adjective

seedy

adj.
B2 Upper Intermediate US /ˈsidi/ UK /sˈiːdi/ seedy

adj.looking dirty, old, and run-down. You use this to describe a place that feels unsafe or a person who looks like they have no money.

adj.characterised by a lack of cleanliness, order, or respectability; often used to describe a person's appearance or a building's condition.


SIMPLE

The old hotel looked seedy and run-down.

CONTEXTUAL

He wore a seedy coat that smelled of smoke and old coffee, making him look like a man with no home.

COMPLEX

The once-grand theater had become a seedy venue for underground performances, its faded velvet curtains and peeling plaster hinting at a long decline in fortunes.


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”.

Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This entry
Origin Middle English sedy
Level B2 · Upper Intermediate
Frequency Occasional
Updated