Literary notes about dingy (AI summary)
The term "dingy" is often employed in literature to evoke a mood of neglect, decay, or an overall lack of vibrancy. Writers use it to describe both physical settings and character traits with a sense of faded, unclean, or gloomy imagery, as seen in descriptions of dingy walls, beds, or paper that suggest long-ago abandonment or wear ([1], [2], [3]). At times, it characterizes the appearance of individuals or even natural elements, emphasizing a dismal quality in both people and places ([4], [5]). Whether portraying dingy rooms that are cheerless and dusty ([6], [7]) or highlighting faded colors and tarnished appearances in objects and garments ([8], [9]), the word serves as a versatile adjective to underscore atmospheres of melancholy and deterioration in a narrative setting.
- I do not suppose he had ever noticed how dingy was the paper on the wall of the room in which on my first visit I found him.
— from The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham - "It was my rat." Ermengarde made one bound, and landed in the middle of the little dingy bed.
— from A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett - I, in my turn, scrutinised the paper; but saw nothing on it save a few dingy stains of paint where I had tried the tint in my pencil.
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë - He was a tall dingy man, in whom length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundery poker.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge - To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.
— from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens - The room looked cheerless and dingy to Edna as she entered.
— from The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories by Kate Chopin - The place was entirely deserted, and looked as dusty and dingy as if it had been so for months.
— from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens - The whitewash was dingy and had fallen off in places.
— from A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett - The product of Guinea is a very small bean, half-way between a peaberry and a flat bean, and has a dingy brown color.
— from All About Coffee by William H. Ukers
