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say it: SHAY-dee
shady is an adjective meaning "quiet, dark, or concealed". It is pronounced /ˈʃeɪdi/ — SHAY-dee. It carries 4 recorded senses.
not as expected
“there was something fishy about the accident”
“up to some funny business”
“some definitely queer goings-on”
“a shady deal”
“her motives were suspect”
“suspicious behavior”
colloquialism
of questionable honesty or legality
“He established a dummy company through which he laundered vast sums of cash from shady middlemen and arms dealers”
colloquialism
filled with shade
“the shady side of the street”
“the surface of the pond is dark and shadowed”
“we sat on rocks in a shadowy cove”
“cool umbrageous woodlands”
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 shady 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.