different between zooty vs sooty

English

Etymology

zoot +? -y

Adjective

zooty (comparative more zooty, superlative most zooty)

1. (dated, informal) stylish, flashy, snappy.
   • 1949, Dwight Martin, “City of Defeat,” Time, 18 April, 1949,^[1]

     Only the silver dollar hawkers have kept up their professional spirits. They hang around street corners, clinking gleaming stacks of coins, their orthodox blue Chinese gowns topped by broad-brimmed brown fedoras that give them, from the neck up, that zooty air usually associated with Broadway characters in Li’l Abner.

   • 1988 Martin A. Janis, The Joys of Aging, Dallas: Word Publishing, p. 122,^[2]

     A man of 75 may be feeling pretty frisky. Frisky enough that he starts chasing the girls of 25. He divorces his wife, buys a set of “zooty threads” as he calls them, and a zippy convertible, and has himself a big time in Las Vegas.

   • 1990, Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia, London: Faber & Faber, 1991, Part Two, Chapter Eighteen, p. 267,^[3]

     I could see he’d become pretty zooty, little Allie. His clothes were Italian and immaculate, daring and colourful without being vulgar, and all expensive and just right: the zips fitted, the seams were straight, and the socks were perfect—you can always tell a quality dresser by the socks.

   • 2002, Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex, New York: Picador, Book One, “The Silver Spoon,” p. 13,^[4]

     From the tender age of twelve, my mother had been unable to start her day without the aid of at least two cups of immoderately strong, tar-black, unsweetened coffee, a taste for which she had picked up from the tugboat captains and zooty bachelors who filled the boardinghouse where she had grown up.

English

Etymology

From Middle English sooty, soty, equivalent to soot +? -y. Probably influenced by similar Middle English suti (“dirty, filthy”), derived from the same root as Old English bes?tian (“to befoul”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?s?ti/
• (dialectal) IPA^(key): /?s?ti/
• Rhymes: -?ti

Adjective

sooty (comparative sootier, superlative sootiest)

1. Of, relating to, or producing soot.
2. Soiled with soot
3. Of the color of soot.
4. (obsolete, literary) Dark-skinned; black.
   • 1834, William Gilmore Simms, Guy Rivers: A tale of Georgia

     While thus reduced, his few surviving senses were at once called into acute activity by the appearance of a sooty little negro, who placed within his grasp a misshapen fold of dirty paper, […]

Synonyms

• (dark-skinned): black, dusky, inky, sable, swarthy

Derived terms

• sooty albatross
• sooty tern

Translations

Verb

sooty (third-person singular simple present sooties, present participle sootying, simple past and past participle sootied)

1. To blacken or make dirty with soot.

Translations

Middle English

Alternative forms

• soti, soty, soyty, sotye

Etymology

From soot +? -y.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?so?ti?/

Adjective

sooty (rare)

1. Soiled with soot; sooty.

Descendants

• English: sooty
• Scots: suitie, sitty, sittie

References

• “s??t?, adj.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 2019-06-14.