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sooty

UK/ˈsʊti/US/ˈsʊti/
adjectiveB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,031 of 15,258leans written

Sooty means blackened with the fine powder that smoke leaves behind. Fingers after handling a grate.

Soot is the black residue of incomplete burning, and it gets everywhere in a house with an open fire. The adjective describes anything marked by it — a sooty chimney, sooty hands, sooty rain in an industrial city. It also describes a colour, so a sooty black bird is very dark indeed. Chimney sweeps are the trade the word belongs to, and a sooty face is the standard picture of one.

Definitions of sooty

  1. 1adjectivesootyCovered in or resembling soot.B2+

    “His hands were sooty from clearing out the grate.”

Where it comes from

  1. Middle English

    sooty

  2. English, today

    sooty

From Middle English sooty, soty, equivalent to soot + -y. Probably influenced by similar Middle English suti (“dirty, filthy”), derived from the same root as Old English besūtian (“to befoul”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, A Song of Ice and Fire

First appears in chapter 29 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

sooty in the wild

  • The sooty mangabey (Cercocebus atys) is an Old World monkey found in forests from Senegal in a margin along the coast down to the Ivory Coast.

    Sooty mangabey

  • Sooty mold (also spelled sooty mould) is a collective term for different Ascomycete fungi, which includes many genera, commonly Cladosporium and Alternaria.

    Sooty mold

  • The sooty albatross (Phoebetria fusca), also known to sailors as the Quaker, is a species of marine bird belonging to the albatross family Diomedeidae.

    Sooty albatross

  • Many horses with the sooty trait have a darker mask on the bony parts of the face.

    Sooty horse

  • The darkest sooty chestnut horses can look nearly black and are sometimes called "black chestnut".

    Sooty horse

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • soot