Feisty means spirited and ready to stand your ground. A feisty response, a feisty old woman, feisty and funny.
It is admiring, but it is applied overwhelmingly to women, to small people and to small dogs, which is why some people hear condescension in it — nobody calls a large man feisty. Its origin is a small dog, and before that a word too rude to print.
1adjectivefeistySpirited and ready to stand your ground.
“The feisty old woman chased the burglar down the street with her umbrella.”
feisty is a quality.
American, from about 1875, from feist, a small yappy dog, from an older word meaning to break wind.
First use appears c. 1875 in the US. From feist + -y; the term feist (now rare) itself originally meant “stink”, and earlier “fart”, from Middle English -, from Old English -, from Proto-Germanic -, presumably from Proto-Indo-European - – see feist for details.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA