Other forms: stys, sties
A sty is the pen where pigs are kept. Muck out the sty, a pig in the sty, keep it like a sty.
Pigs are in fact clean animals and will not soil where they sleep if given room, so a filthy sty says more about the keeper than the pig. Calling a room a sty is a standard insult. A sty on the eyelid is a different word entirely, and is a small infection.
1nounstyThe pen where pigs are kept.
“The pigs rolled happily in the mud of their sty.”
sty is a pen.
Old English sti meant a pen or enclosure, from a Germanic root.
Proto-Germanic
*stiją
Proto-West Germanic
*stī
Old English
stī
Middle English
sty
English, today
sty
Built from
From Middle English sty, from Old English stī, stiġ (“sty, pen, a wooden enclosure; hall”), from Proto-West Germanic stī, from Proto-Germanic stiją. Cognate with German Stiege (“wooden crate”), dialectal Steige (“hen-coop”), Danish sti (“sty, enclosure for swine, sheep, hens, etc.”), Swedish stia (“sty for pigs, geese, etc.”), Norwegian sti (“flock of sheep”), Icelandic stía (“a kennel”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA