resty
resty adjective: restive, resistant to control.
Adjective
resty (comparative more resty, superlative most resty)
- Restive, resistant to control.
- In vaine the Pagan bannes, and sweares, and rayles, / And backe with both his hands unto him hayles / The resty raynes […]1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto VIII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
- [N]either knovv I vvhether it is more hard to manage of the tvvo, a dejected eſtate, or a proſperous, vvhether vve may be more incommodated vvith a reſty horſe, or vvith a tyred one: […]1645, Jos[eph] Hall, “Sect[ion] II. The Contrariety of Estates wherein Contentation is to be Exercised.”, in The Remedy of Discontentment: Or, A Treatise of Contentation in whatsoever Condition: […]...
- Disposed to rest; inactive, lazy.
- […] Come; our stomachs / Will make what’s homely savoury: weariness / Can snore upon the flint, when resty sloth / Finds the down pillow hard.1611 April (first recorded performance), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Cymbeline”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard...
- [A]ll [beef] is rejected and unfit for such as lead a resty life, anyways inclined to melancholy, or dry of complexion […]1621, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy, […], Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] John Lichfield and Iames Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC
Examples of resty in a sentence
- I could not come a moment sooner; I hardly expected to get here at all, for my horse has been so confounded resty I could not tell how to get him along.1782, [Frances Burney], chapter VI, in Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress. […], volume I, London: […] T[homas] Payne and Son […], and...
- The third, the resty one, springing backwards past me, almost on his haunches, jerked his halter wide of my clutch, and in a moment was galloping full flight down the slope.1910, Arthur Quiller-Couch (as “Q”), “The Copernican Convoy” in Corporal Sam and Other Stories, London: Smith, Elder, p. 57
Forms of resty
| comparative | more resty |
|---|---|
| superlative | most resty |
Origin of resty
Variant of restiff.
Words formed from resty
Words that rhyme with resty
Questions about resty
- What does resty mean?
- Resty means restive, resistant to control.
- How do you use resty in a sentence?
- I could not come a moment sooner; I hardly expected to get here at all, for my horse has been so confounded resty I could not tell how to get him along.
- What part of speech is resty?
- Resty is an adjective.
Words near resty in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: resty (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-resty.wav.
Cite this entry: “resty.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/resty. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.