oozy

English

Etymology

From ooze +‎ -y.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈuːzi/

• Audio (Southern England):

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• Audio (Canada):

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• Homophone: uzi
• Rhymes: -uːzi

Adjective

oozy (comparative oozier, superlative ooziest)

1. Of or pertaining to the quality of something that oozes.
   • 1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, scene i]:

     A daughter?
     Oh heauens, that they were liuing both in Nalpes
     The King and Queene there, that they were, I wish
     My selfe were mudded in that oo-zie bed
     Where my sonne lies: when did you lose your daughter?

   • 1842 December – 1844 July, Charles Dickens, “Chapter 13”, in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1844, →OCLC:

     [The rain] fell with an oozy, slushy sound among the grass; and made a muddy kennel of every furrow in the ploughed fields.

   • 1912, James Stephens, Mary, Mary (published in the UK as The Charwoman's Daughter), New York: Boni & Liveright, Chapter XXIV, p. 175, [1]

     Her vocabulary could not furnish her with the qualifying word, or rather, epithet for his bigness. Horrible was suggested and retained, but her instinct clamored that there was a fat, oozy word somewhere which would have brought comfort to her brains and her hands and feet.

   • 1918, Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism‎^[2], London: Macmillan & Co., page 38:

     Each country is casting its net of espionage into the slimy bottom of the others, fishing for their secrets, the treacherous secrets which brew in the oozy depths of diplomacy.

   • 1922, Sinclair Lewis, chapter IX, in Babbitt, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Company, →OCLC, page 123:

     […] he gulped down a chill and glutinous slice of the ice-cream brick, and cocoanut cake as oozy as shaving-cream.

   • 2015, Vincent Giroud, chapter 1, in Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music, Oxford University Press:

     On birthdays and saints' days, Jewish musicians from the local community were invited to perform festive music and played "an extraordinary variety of music: potpourris of famous operas, military marches, Viennese waltzes, and the ooziest gypsy songs and Jewish dances, rampant with glissandos, tremolos, and tearful vibratos."

Derived terms

• oozily
• ooziness