Word.ws English Dictionary

crufty

crufty adjective: relating to or containing cruft.

Adjective

crufty (comparative cruftier, superlative cruftiest)

  1. (informal) Relating to or containing cruft.
  2. (informal) Poorly built and overly-complex, and unpleasant.
  3. Unrefined, dirty or worn.
    • All these years I been living with you we en't go nowhere. You want a beast of burden, not a woman. Because you is a big, crufty, niggerman with the strength of an ox and a mind big and empty like midday sky you think me is the same.1972, Jan Carew, The wild coast
    • I thought I caught him sneering at Kevin and me, in our crufty pants and shoes, but I couldn't be sure.2013, Richard Bowker, The Portal (An Alternative History Novel), page 1614174636

Forms of crufty

comparativecruftier
superlativecruftiest

Origin of crufty

From cruft + -y. Arose after 1959, presumably mid-1960s. Perhaps influenced by cruddy, crusty.

Words formed from crufty

Questions about crufty

What does crufty mean?
Crufty means relating to or containing cruft.
What part of speech is crufty?
Crufty is an adjective.

Words near crufty in the dictionary

  1. cruftiest
  2. cruftiness
  3. crufting
  4. crufts
  5. cruftware
  6. crufty
  7. crug
  8. Cruickshank
  9. Cruickshanks
  10. Cruikshank
  11. Cruikshankian

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: crufty (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: “crufty.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crufty. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.