Word.ws English Dictionary

saltier

saltier is the comparative form of salty.

saltier is the alternative form of saltire.

Meaning of salty

Adjective

salty (comparative saltier, superlative saltiest)

  1. Tasting of salt.
    • A few types of molecules get sensed by receptors on the tongue. Protons coming off of acids ping receptors for "sour." Sugars get received as "sweet." Bitter, salty, and the proteinaceous flavor umami all set off their own neural cascades.2018 May 16, Adam Rogers, “The Fundamental Nihilism of Yanny vs. Laurel”, in Wired
  2. Containing salt.
    • At Zipaquirá, the salty ore is taken from the mine in chunks, then thrown into large tanks of water, where the salt is dissolved out. The resulting brine is drawn off into pipelines, containers, or tank trucks and sold […]1957, Americas (English Ed.)
  3. (figuratively) Coarse; provocative; earthy.
    • In the following piece she has some characteristically salty things to say about what happens when law and medicine meet.1962, William Henry Davenport, The Good Physician: A Treasury of Medicine
  4. (figuratively) Experienced, especially used to indicate a veteran of the naval services; salty dog (from salt of the sea).
    • There's a sailor's tavern at the end of the street where I could find companionship if I chose (one catches salty boys going in and out at any hour) but only music matters to me now.2004, David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, London: Sceptre (Hodder and Stoughton), →ISBN
  5. (slang) Irritated, annoyed, angry, bitter.
    • Ray and Fuzzy were salty with our unhip no-playing piano player, because she broke time on the piano so bad that the strings yelled whoa to the hammers.1946, Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow, Bernard Wolfe, “They Found the Body in a Ditch”, in Really the Blues, New York, N.Y.: Random House, book 2 (1923–1928: Chicago, Chicago), page 61
  6. Pertaining to the Sardinian language and those dialects of Catalan, spoken in the Balearic Islands and along the coast of Catalonia, that use definitive articles descended from the Latin ipse (“self”) instead of the Latin ille (“that”).

Meaning of saltire

Noun

saltire (plural saltires)

  1. An ordinary (geometric design) in the shape of an X. It usually occupies the entire field in which it is placed.
  2. The Saint Andrew's cross, the flag of Scotland.
    • But the World Cup winning veteran's left boot was awry again, the attempt sliced horribly wide of the left upright, and the saltires were waving aloft again a moment later when a long pass in the England midfield was picked off to almost offer up a breakaway try.2011 October 1, Tom Fordyce, “Rugby World Cup 2011: England 16 – 12 Scotland”, in BBC Sport, archived from the original on 26 Sep 2016
  3. The Saint Patrick's Cross, the pre 1922 flag of Ireland.

Forms of saltier

pluralsaltiers

Questions about saltier

What is saltier the comparative form of?
Saltier is the comparative form of salty.

Words near saltier in the dictionary

  1. salthouses
  2. salti mortali
  3. salticid
  4. salticids
  5. saltie
  6. saltier
  7. saltierra
  8. saltierras
  9. saltiers
  10. saltierwise
  11. salties

Source and license

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