seedy

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   Dirty, run-down, and slightly disreputable.

   They ended up in a seedy bar on the edge of town.

2. 2
   adj

   Full of seeds.

   The melon was too seedy to eat comfortably.

From Middle English sedy, equivalent to seed + -y. The senses with negative connotation, first attested by 1725 in slang, originally especially “poor, out of money”, probably arose from the metaphor of a flower that has gone to seed, and is no longer considered beautiful. From there the word came to be used to describe unwell or past-their-prime people, and parallelly run-down places and by extension low-income or crime-affected urban areas. Compare the figurative expressions go to seed (by 1817), etc., originally in reference to plants, “cease flowering as seeds develop”.

Topics