Other forms: sullied
To sully something is to spoil its cleanness, or a good name. Sully her reputation, sullied by the affair, unsullied by any of it.
It is chiefly literary and almost always figurative now: reputations and records are sullied, floors are not. Unsullied is used more than sully itself and means untouched and unspoilt. Note tarnish and besmirch, which are the near equivalents and are equally literary; and that all three are the sort of word that appears in resignation letters and nowhere else.
1verbsullyTo spoil the cleanness of something or a good name.
“He didn't want to sully his family's good name by getting involved in the scandal.”
sully is a spoiling.
SULLY → SILLY
One silly photograph goes round the office, and a name that took thirty years to build now has a mark on it that will not wash off.
hooks ontosilly
Old English sylian means to soil or pollute, from a root meaning muck. Soil and sully are the same idea from different sources, and the two verbs have run alongside each other for a thousand years.
Proto-Indo-European
*sūl- — thick liquid, muck
Proto-West Germanic
*sulwōn
Old English
sylian — to soil, pollute; to sully
Middle English
sulen
English, today
sully
Built from
From Middle English sulen, sulien (“to become dirty; to defile, pollute, taint”), from Old English sylian (“to soil, pollute; to sully”), from Proto-West Germanic sulwōn, sulwijan (“to make dirty; to sully”), from Proto-Indo-European sūl- (“thick liquid, muck”), perhaps conflated partially with Old French souillier (“to soil”) (modern French souiller) from the same Germanic source. The word is cognate with Danish søle (“to sully”), vls seulewen (“to sully”) (Middle Dutch soluwen (“to sully”)), German sühlen (“to sully”), Old Saxon sulian (“to sully”), Swedish söla (“to sully”). Also compare Middle English sulpen (“to defile, pollute”), Old English solian (“to soil, become defiled, make or become foul”), and see more at soil.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire