Foxy is slang for strikingly sexy and good-looking. A foxy dress, she looked foxy, a foxy smile.
It is dated — the word belongs to the 1970s and using it now sounds like a costume — and it is applied to women far more than to men. The older sense is fox-like, meaning cunning, and the compliment grew out of the sharpness rather than the animal's looks.
1adjectivefoxyStrikingly sexy and good-looking.
“He thought she looked foxy in her leather jacket and red lipstick.”
foxy is a slang compliment.
Fox plus -y. The word first meant cunning or fox-like, and the sense of attractiveness is twentieth-century American slang.
Middle English
fox
English
fox
English, today
foxy
Built from
From fox + y. Compare stq fuksich (“foxy”), West Frisian foksich (“foxy”), Dutch vossig (“foxy”), German Low German vossig (“foxy”), German fuchsig (“foxy”). fox comes from Middle English fox. From Middle English fox, from Old English fox (“fox”), from Proto-West Germanic fuhs, from Proto-Germanic fuhsaz (“fox”), from Proto-Indo-European púḱsos (“the tailed one”), possibly from puḱ- (“tail”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA