Stringy means tough and full of fibres. Stringy meat, stringy celery, stringy and dry.
In meat it means the muscle fibres have not broken down, which long slow cooking fixes and fast cooking does not. In celery and beans the strings can be pulled off. Of a person it means thin and sinewy. Note string, and that the -y ending makes the adjective.
1adjectivestringyTough and full of fibres.
“The cheap beef was so stringy that we could hardly chew it.”
stringy is a quality of texture.
Proto-Indo-European
*strengʰ- — rope, cord, strand; to tighten
Proto-Germanic
*strangiz — string
Proto-West Germanic
*strangi
Old English
strenġ
Middle English
string
English
string
English, today
stringy
From string + -y. string comes from Middle English string, streng, strynge, from Old English strenġ, from Proto-West Germanic strangi, from Proto-Germanic strangiz (“string”), from Proto-Indo-European strengʰ- (“rope, cord, strand; to tighten”). Cognate with Scots string (“string”), Dutch streng (“cord, strand”), Low German strenge (“strand, cord, rope”), German Strang (“strand, cord, rope”), Danish streng (“string”), Swedish sträng (“string, cord, wire”), Icelandic strengur (“string”), Latvian stringt (“to be tight, wither”), Latin stringō (“to tighten”), Ancient Greek στραγγαλόομαι (“to strangle”), from στραγγάλη (“halter”), Ancient Greek στραγγός (“tied together, entangled, twisted”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA