mustily

comparative more mustily · superlative most mustily

1. In a musty manner.

   1603, Michel de Montaigne, Essayes, translated by John Florio, The Second Chapter, “Of Repenting,” […] nor are there any spirits, or very rare ones, which in growing old taste not sowrely and mustily.

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   All this is but a light-headed understanding now; I mean, why so melancholy? thou lookest mustily, methinks.

   1620, Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, The World Tost at Tennis

   My little guide steered me up a filthy, crooked, crazy staircase to an upper floor so lighted, and into a room that smelt of sawdust, shavings, glue, shellac, rancidly-oiled metal, and all kinds of rankly or mustily malodorous muddle.

   1871, Richard Rowe, chapter 30, in Episodes in an Obscure Life, New York: George Routledge & Sons, page 370

   He was no student mustily thinking in a dead language, but a gentleman in waiting to the king, knight of the Order of St. Michael, writing in fresh, poetic French, with all the captivation of charm, teaching the fundamental principles of doubt and uncertainty […]

   1903, Henry Dwight Sedgwick, “Montaigne”, in Essays on Great Writers, Houghton, Mifflin & Co, page 101

   1908, O. Henry, “The Shocks of Doom” in The Voice of The City: Further Stories of the Four Million, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1914, pp. 96-7, He was either young or old; cheap lodging-houses had flavored him mustily; razors and combs had passed him by; in him drink had been bottled and sealed in the devil’s bond.

   The single window, square and mustily curtained, is so small that it cannot be imagined to admit much light on the brightest of days […]

   1912, Booth Tarkington, Beauty and the Jacobin: an Interlude of the French Revolution, Harper & Bros., page 2