ENGLISH
REFERENCE

seedy

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

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.

Synonyms
Antonyms
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”.

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