Word.ws English Dictionary

contrasty

contrasty adjective: having great contrast between light and dark areas (of a subject or photograph).

Adjective

contrasty (comparative more contrasty, superlative most contrasty)

  1. Having great contrast between light and dark areas (of a subject or photograph).
    • His inherently less contrasty and detailed paper negative work, toward the end of his life, is at least more ambivalent and not so cold.1982 February 6, Martin Krieger, “Stark/Erotic”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 28, page 10
    • The WFM display above shows a very contrasty picture with clipped whites and blacks.2004, John Jackman, Lighting for Digital Video and Television, page 25

Forms of contrasty

comparativemore contrasty
superlativemost contrasty

Origin of contrasty

From contrast + -y.

Questions about contrasty

What does contrasty mean?
Contrasty means having great contrast between light and dark areas (of a subject or photograph).
What part of speech is contrasty?
Contrasty is an adjective.

Words near contrasty in the dictionary

  1. contrastless
  2. contrastlessness
  3. contrastment
  4. contrastography
  5. contrasts
  6. contrasty
  7. contrasuggestibility
  8. contrasuggestible
  9. contrasuppression
  10. contrasuppressor
  11. contrasuppressors

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: contrasty (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “contrasty.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/contrasty. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.