Salty

How to spell salty

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce salty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does salty mean?

1. adjectiveTasting strongly of salt, or containing a lot of salt.
2. adjectiveBitter, annoyed, or resentful, especially after losing or being criticised.

Salty in a sentence

• The soup was far too salty after he tipped in the whole packet.

• He got salty when his colleague took credit for the report.

• Sea air left a salty film on the car windows.

• Fans were still salty about the referee's decision a week later.

Where does salty come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word traces back to the Old English noun 'sealt', the native Germanic term for the mineral we sprinkle on food, which has close cousins across the Germanic family in Dutch 'zout' and German 'Salz', and a deeper relative in the Latin 'sal' that gave us words like 'salad' and 'salary'. The adjective form was built simply by adding the everyday English suffix '-y', which turns a noun into a quality, so 'salty' literally means 'full of salt' or 'tasting of salt'. By the seafaring centuries it picked up a flavour of the sea and of weathered sailors, lending it a sense of rough, earthy, plain-spoken character. In modern North American slang it took a further turn to mean bitter, irritated, or resentful, a sense that spread widely online from the late twentieth century onward. The spelling is reassuringly regular: keep the 'l' from 'salt' and add '-y', with no doubling and no silent surprises.

How the word is built

• salt (from Old English sealt: salt)
• -y (adjective suffix meaning 'characterised by')