frowsty

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frowsty (comparative frowstier, superlative frowstiest)

1. (British) musty; stuffy (atmosphere)
   • 1918, Siegfried Sassoon, "A Working Party" in The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, New York: Dutton & Co., lines 41-44,

     He thought of getting back by half-past twelve, / And tot of rum to send him warm to sleep / In draughty dug-out frowsty with the fumes / Of coke, and full of snoring weary men.

   • 1933 September, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “The Text Resumes: The Tyranny of the Second Council”, in The Shape of Things to Come, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC, 4th book (The Modern State Militant), page 362:

     Man, he says, was still "frowsty-minded" and "half asleep" in the early twenty-first century, still in urgent danger of a relapse into the confused nightmare living of the Age of Frustration.

   • 1950, C. S. Lewis, chapter 10, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Collins, published 1998:

     So Mrs. Beaver and the children came bundling out of the cave, all blinking in the daylight, and with earth all over them, and looking very frowsty and unbrushed and uncombed and with the sleep in their eyes.