Stale is what happens to bread left out — hard, dry, past its best. The sandwich you forgot in your bag, the crisps that have lost their snap, the air in a room where the windows have been shut for a week.
Bread goes stale, and that is the verb pattern to keep: go stale, not become staled. Do not stretch it to milk, which goes off or goes sour instead. Air and smells are stale when nothing has moved them — stale cigarette smoke, stale sweat, the stale warmth of a car left in the sun. Then the same word turns on ideas and people: a stale joke everyone has heard, a stale argument going round again, a marriage gone stale, a player who looks stale after too many games. The opposite in every one of those uses is fresh.
1adjectivestale(Of food) no longer fresh; dry or hard from being kept too long.
“The bread was three days old and completely stale.”
Patternstale + noun (bread, biscuits, air) · go stale · a stale smell · staleness
2adjectivesmell(Of air or a smell) heavy and unpleasant from not being changed.
“The flat smelled stale, like old smoke and wet coats.”
3adjectivenewNo longer new or interesting; tired from too much repetition.
“His jokes had gone stale years ago.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
sTALE → an old TALE told too often
Bread left out for a week goes hard, and so does a story told too many times: both are stale.
Stale came into Middle English from Old French estal, a fixed position or a place, and it probably rests on the Germanic verb behind stand. Something stale is something that has stood: beer standing in the glass, bread standing on the counter, air that nobody has stirred for days.
Proto-Germanic
*stāną — to stand
Old French
estal — fixed position, place
Middle English
stale
English, today
stale
From Middle English stale, from Old French estal (“fixed position, place”), but probably originally from Proto-Germanic stāną (“to stand”): compare vls stel in the same sense for ‘beer’ and ‘urine’.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA