Word.ws English Dictionary

rorty

/ˈɹɔː(ɹ)ti/

rorty adjective: boisterous, rowdy, saucy, dissipated, or risqué.

Adjective

rorty (comparative rortier, superlative rortiest)

  1. (UK, informal) Boisterous, rowdy, saucy, dissipated, or risqué.
    • "Tell us a good story, Rodney — one of your rorty ones." / Mr. Rodney shrivelled. / "I fear," he murmured — "I fear I am scarcely in the — er — rorty vein to-night."1898, Robert Smythe Hichens, The Londoners, page 280
    • But compared with the heavy, muffling darkness of the night in which the countryside was sunk, the lights looked positively rorty1932, Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

Proper noun capitalized: Rorty

Rorty

  1. A surname

Forms of rorty

comparativerortier
superlativerortiest
alternative formraughty

Origin of rorty

19th century UK. Unknown etymology. Farmer (1903) categorises the term as costermongers' slang.

Words formed from rorty

Words that rhyme with rorty

Questions about rorty

What does rorty mean?
Rorty means boisterous, rowdy, saucy, dissipated, or risqué.
What part of speech is rorty?
Rorty can be an adjective or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce rorty?
Rorty is pronounced /ˈɹɔː(ɹ)ti/.

Words near rorty in the dictionary

  1. rortier
  2. rortiest
  3. rortiness
  4. rorting
  5. rorts
  6. rorty
  7. Rortyan
  8. rortyness
  9. rorulent
  10. rory
  11. rory-cum-tory

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rorty (page history and authors); Rorty (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: “rorty.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rorty. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.