Dictionaries › English

fustian

Pronunciation: /ˈfʌs.tɪ.ən/

The English word “fustian” has 8 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. Originally, a kind of coarse fabric made from cotton and flax; now, a kind of coarse twilled cotton, or cotton and linen, stuff with a short pile and often dyed a dull colour, which is chiefly prepared for menswear.
  2. A class of fabric including corduroy and velveteen.
  3. Inflated, pompous, or pretentious speech or writing; bombast; also (archaic), incoherent or unintelligible speech or writing; gibberish, nonsense.
  4. Chiefly in rum fustian: a hot drink made of a mixture of alcoholic beverages (as beer, gin, and sherry or white wine) with egg yolk, lemon, and spices.

adjective

  1. Made out of fustian (noun sense 1).
  2. Of a person, or their speech or writing: using inflated, pompous, or pretentious language; bombastic; grandiloquent; also (obsolete) using incoherent or unintelligible language.
  3. Imaginary; invented.
  4. Useless; worthless.

Etymology

The noun is derived from Middle English fustian (“type of fabric, probably made from cotton, flax, or wool; piece of fustian spread over a bed or mattress”) [and other forms], from Old French fustaine, fustaigne (modern French futaine), from Medieval Latin fūstāneum, from (pannus) fūstāneus or (tela) fūstānea, of disputed origin. Sense 3 (“inflated, pompous, or pretentious speech or writing”) is…

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “fustian” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.