stringy

English

Etymology

From string +‎ -y.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈstɹɪŋi/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɪŋi

Adjective

stringy (comparative stringier, superlative stringiest)

1. Composed of, or resembling, string or strings.
2. (of food) Tough to the bite, as containing too much sinew or string tissue.

   The meat was quite stringy.

3. (of a person) Wiry, lean, scrawny.
   • 1908, W[illiam] B[lair] M[orton] Ferguson, chapter I, in Zollenstein, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, →OCLC:

     The colonel and his sponsor made a queer contrast: Greystone [the sponsor] long and stringy, with a face that seemed as if a cold wind was eternally playing on it.

   • 1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “(please specify the chapter number)”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, published April 2019:

     "I know, I know," said the man who had been addressed as Peeble, a nervous, stringy, dried-up person as he now appeared in the light.

4. (programming, informal) Resembling or involving text strings.
   • 2011, Randal L. Schwartz, brian d foy, Tom Phoenix, Learning Perl, page 56:

     The context refers to how you use an expression. You've actually already seen some contextual operations with numbers and strings. When you do numbery sorts of things, you get numeric results. When you do stringy sorts of things, you get string results.

5. (birdwatching) Of a sighting, unlikely to be accurate; probably based on a misidentification, whether innocent or deliberate.
   • 1980, Bill Oddie, Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book, page 76:

     There are few birders who have not had stringy ticks on their lists at some stage.

Synonyms

• fibrous
• filamentous

Derived terms

• stringiness
• stringy floppy

Translations

resembling strings

• Bulgarian: жилест (bg) (žilest)
• French: filandreux (fr) m
• Irish: sreangach
• Italian: fibroso (it) (of meat)
• Russian: волокнистый (ru) m (voloknistyj)
• Welsh: llinynllyd

Anagrams

• tryings