Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use rusty in a sentence

40 example sentences · adjective, noun

Rusty means marked or corroded by rust. Example: “The stupid rusty wire cut my thumb when I grabbed it.”

Examples of rusty by meaning

adjectiveMarked or corroded by rust.

  • The overall mood of this volume is one of melancholy and loss, weary resignation to one's lot—trudging round and round on the rusty hamster wheel of life.2002 June 28, Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 07 Dec 2019, retrieved 23 Sep...

adjectiveLacking recent experience, out of practice, especially with respect to a skill or activity.

  • Before the match, Hodgson had expressed the hope that his players would be fresh rather than rusty after an 18-day break from league commitments because of two successive postponements.2010 December 29, Sam Sheringham, “Liverpool 0-1 Wolverhampton”, in BBC Sport, archived from the original on 17 Mar 2011

adjectiveOf clothing, especially dark clothing: worn, shabby.

  • He wore a black jacket, rusty and amorphous.1911, Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson
  • The clerk stared at him and the rusty black bonnet a moment, and then laughed.1908 October, Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC

More sentences with rusty

  • The stupid rusty wire cut my thumb when I grabbed it.From the entry stupid
  • I was rusty, but after a few months, I got back into practice.From the entry practice
  • After years of neglect, the rusty old bridge could give way at any time.From the entry give way
  • No one realized that propane gas was leaking from a rusty tank in the concession area, slowly filling the unventilated room.From the entry leak
  • They usually wire-wheel rusty stock when prepping it for fabrication.From the entry wire-wheel
  • My French is a little rusty.From the entry french
  • You can't afford to just sit there on your rusty dusty feeling sorry for yourself.2014, James Willis, Faith Made Easy. From the entry rusty dusty
  • It seemed defeatingly solid, but the metal building attaching to the frame seemed rusty and fatigued.2012, Paula Rae Wallace, The Andersons, page 298. From the entry defeatingly
  • Don′t miss the rusty relics dredged up from the original pier, and the spooky old sideshow machines.2009, Charles Rawlings-Way, Meg Worby, Lindsay Brown, Paul Harding, Central Australia: Adelaide to Darwin, Lonely Planet, page 63. From the entry sideshow
  • Either she'd gotten lippier down the years, or he was getting rusty.2006, Ian Rankin, chapter 1, in The Naming of the Dead, London: Orion, →ISBN, side 1 (The Task of Blood). From the entry lippy
  • Leave these ladies at rest on their big fat rusty dusties?2006, Mo Foster, A Blues for Shindig, page 70. From the entry rusty dusty
  • Rusty is going get jealous of you talking nasty with other guys.2004 October 3, Barbara's Cat, “i'm really enjoying this...”, in rec.arts.poems (Usenet). From the entry talk nasty
  • His "combiangs" and "ker voolay voos" raced through the tongue of Moliere like a rusty lawn mower.1973, Victor Sawdon Pritchett, Midnight Oil, page 17. From the entry voolay
  • You could practically hear the rusty wheels whirring round beneath his black peaky blinder.1968, Maurice Wiggin, The Memoirs of a Maverick, page 30. From the entry peaky blinder
  • Rusty wrought-iron gates and cramped once-painted wooden enclosures bordered and defined scrabbly little plots of Astroturf and overgrown weeds.2014, Denise Chávez, The King and Queen of Comezón, →ISBN, page 276. From the entry scrabbly
  • The Kenema Government Hospital, in Kenema, Sierra Leone, is a scatter of low yellow-and-red-painted cinder-block buildings with rusty metal roofs.2014 October 20, Richard Preston, “The Ebola Wars: How genomics research can help contain the outbreak”, in The New Yorker. From the entry Kenema
  • An old, rusty coat hanger made a rudimentary fish-gutter.2013, Don Keith, Shelley Stewart, Mattie C.'s Boy: The Shelley Stewart Story, page 34. From the entry gutter
  • Rusty spotting and yellowings occur on the lower basal leaves.2013, Robert F. Nyvall, Field Crop Diseases Handbook, page 419. From the entry yellowing
  • Where, according to the rusty sign dangling over the entrance, a superfun, amazing time awaits the entire family.2013, T. R. Burns, A World of Trouble, page 335. From the entry superfun
  • Here, she found a small landing bay that housed a rusty cargo ship, with a couple of old starsailors beside it.2013, SF Said, Phoenix, page 29. From the entry starsailor
  • Save for a rusty, seatless swing set, the Brinket-Hibbard Playlot resembles many vacant lots pockmarking Detroit's hardscrabble east side.2007 December 29, Susan Saulny, “Detroit Considers Sale of City's Small Parks”, in New York Times. From the entry pockmarking
  • Rusty corkscrewed the plane back down again, but instead of mashing the throttles to the wall, he pulled them to idle.2006, Rocky Raab, Baggy Zero Four, page 155. From the entry corkscrew
  • MOOJ: It's not about these rusty trombone, and dirty sanchez.2005, Directed by Judd Apatow. Written by Judd Apatow and Steve Carell, The 40-Year-Old Virgin. From the entry donkey punching
  • Her pleased laughter had a sound like a rusty doorhinge.2000, Irene Bennett Brown, The Plainswoman, page 281. From the entry doorhinge
  • Another rusty cut and they'll close the school shore.1978, James Still, River of Earth. From the entry allus
  • A cricket in the trees grated like a rusty doorhinge.1976, David MacKenzie, Raven in Flight, page 73. From the entry doorhinge
  • Billy made a noise like a small, rusty hinge.1969, Kurt Vonnegut, chapter 5, in Slaughterhouse-Five, New York: Dial, published 2005, page 151. From the entry seminal vesicle
  • Like Marsha, his hair was tinged a faint rusty red.c. 1950, Philip K. Dick, Voices From the Street, published 2007, →ISBN. From the entry playsuit
  • Rebecca found herself involuntarily holding her breath and a moment later she spotted the beautiful rusty fur coat of a fox emerging from the bushes.2019, John Darke, Mr Blue Sky, →ISBN, page 258. From the entry fur coat
  • Iron Springs offers a guided clam dig for first timers or those who are rusty at spotting the clam's show at low tide.2014, Karen Gaudette Brewer, Seafood Lover's Pacific Northwest, page 128. From the entry dig
  • There was a bright-red plastic baby-bath, a car tyre, a rusty mangle, and something that looked like a primitive version of a washing machine.1993, John Banville, Ghosts. From the entry mangle
  • While we were talking, one of the chows, the rusty one, had come over to me and I was absently petting him.1988 March 4, Jane Weinberg, “First Person: Me and Georgia O'Keeffe”, in Chicago Reader. From the entry chow
  • We returned to the crossing, passing slowly through the high rusty stands of dock weeds and the fleshy beds of dense paspalum.1985, Peter Carey, Illywhacker, Faber and Faber, published 2003, page 249. From the entry paspalum
  • Everything had been old for too long, lazy and rusty and now, it wanted, at a single jolt, to become modern, ultramodern, supertechnical.1964, Stefan Zweig, The world of yesterday: an autobiography, page 331. From the entry supertechnical
  • There the tire-tracks swept round a curve, away from the leafy stormy hill lane that had a rusty iron smell of cottages and pigscots.1956, Gwyn Jones, Welsh Short Stories, page 61. From the entry pigscot
  • And, in that moment came one, fierce and wild of aspect, in dinted casque and rusty mail who stood and watched--ah God!1915, Jeffery Farnol, Beltane The Smith. From the entry dint

Meaning of rusty

  1. adjective Marked or corroded by rust.
  2. adjective Of the rust color, reddish or reddish-brown.
  3. adjective Lacking recent experience, out of practice, especially with respect to a skill or activity.

Full definition of rusty

Questions about rusty in a sentence

How do you use rusty in a sentence?
Rusty is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “The stupid rusty wire cut my thumb when I grabbed it.”
What is a short sentence with rusty?
“My French is a little rusty.”
What does rusty mean?
Rusty means marked or corroded by rust.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rusty (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use rusty in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/rusty. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.