Loading page
say it: DUR-tee
dirty is an adjective and verb meaning "soiled or likely to soil with dirt or grime". It is pronounced /ˈdɝti/ — DUR-tee. It carries 13 recorded senses.
soiled or likely to soil with dirt or grime
“dirty unswept sidewalks”
“a child in dirty overalls”
“dirty slums”
“piles of dirty dishes”
“put his dirty feet on the clean sheet”
“wore an unclean shirt”
“mining is a dirty job”
“Cinderella did the dirty work while her sisters preened themselves”
(of behavior or especially language) characterized by obscenity or indecency
“dirty words”
“a dirty old man”
“dirty books and movies”
“boys telling dirty jokes”
“has a dirty mouth”
spreading pollution or contamination; especially radioactive contamination
“the air near the foundry was always dirty”
“a dirty bomb releases enormous amounts of long-lived radioactive fallout”
contaminated with infecting organisms
“dirty wounds”
“obliged to go into infected rooms”
obtained illegally or by improper means
“dirty money”
“ill-gotten gains”
violating accepted standards or rules
“a dirty fighter”
“used foul means to gain power”
“a nasty unsporting serve”
“fined for unsportsmanlike behavior”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for dirty come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.