Sturdy means strongly built and unlikely to break. A sturdy table, sturdy boots, sturdy enough.
It suggests solid construction rather than great strength — a sturdy chair takes daily use for years without complaint. It applies to people too, meaning solidly built or resolute: a sturdy defence, sturdy independence. Note sturdily, sturdiness; and that the word once meant reckless or violent, from an Old French word meaning dazed, which is a long way from a reliable shelf.
1adjectivesturdyStrongly built and unlikely to break.
“Buy a sturdy pair of boots if you're going to walk in the mountains.”
sturdy is a quality of solid strength.
Old French estourdi meant dazed or reckless, and Middle English sturdy meant bold and rebellious. The shift from violent to merely solid took several centuries and is not fully explained.
Vulgar Latin
*exturdire
Old French
estourdi — dazed
Middle English
sturdy
English, today
sturdy
Built from
From Middle English sturdy, stourdy, stordy (“bold, valiant, strong, stern, fierce, rebellious”) (perhaps influenced by Middle English sture, stoure, stor (“strong, robust, harsh, stern, violent, fierce, sturdy”); see English stour), from Old French estourdi (“dazed”), form of estourdir, originally “to daze, to make tipsy (almost drunk)” (Modern French étourdir (“to daze, to make tipsy”)), from Vulgar Latin exturdire. Latin - etymology is unclear – presumably it is ex- + turdus (“thrush (bird)”), but how this should mean “daze” is unclear. A speculative theory is that thrushes eat leftover winery grapes and thus became drunk, but this meets with objections. Disease in cows and sheep is by extension of sense of “daze”, while sense of “strongly built” is of late 14th century, and relationship to earlier sense is less clear, perhaps from sense of a firm strike (causing a daze) or a strong, violent person.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA