Seedy means shabby and faintly disreputable. A seedy hotel, a seedy character, the seedy end of town.
It suggests neglect and slight moral doubt at once, which is a lot of work for one syllable. The origin is a plant gone to seed and past its best. In older British use, feeling seedy also means feeling slightly unwell.
1adjectiveseedyShabby and faintly disreputable.
“He spent his evenings in a seedy bar down a dark back street.”
seedy is a quality.
SEEDY → the NEEDY end of town
The needy end of town, where the paint is old and nothing is quite honest.
hooks ontoneedy
Seed plus -y. A plant gone to seed is past its prime, which is where the sense of shabbiness came from.
Proto-Indo-European
*seh₁-
Middle English
sedy
English, today
seedy
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 from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA