windy1
/ˈwɪndi
/adjective (windier, windiest)
1Characterized by or exposed to strong winds: a very windy day the cold, windy hills...
- Avoid low spots that might flood, as well as high, exposed, or windy locations.
- It was clear from the start that the strong windy conditions were going to have an immediate effect on the result of the game.
- Hilly areas are often windy, but the wind could blow strong for certain periods and then not at all during others.
Synonyms
breezy, blowy, fresh, blustery, gusty;
wild, stormy, squally, tempestuous, turbulent;
chiefly Northern English wuthering
rare boisterous, blusterous
windswept, exposed, unprotected, open to the elements, bare, bleak
2British Suffering from, marked by, or causing an accumulation of gas in the alimentary canal.After a good night out, I find I am very windy the next morning, so much so that I am totally bloated and cannot do up my trousers.
3 informal Using or expressed in many words that sound impressive but mean little: the way to save time in an exam is by omitting windy phrases...
- Even on radio, their rhetorical style sounds windy, verbose, addicted to polysyllables for their own sake.
- Election Day in a Chinese village brings Jimmy Carter, windy speeches, and dubious promises
- The king goes on to bore the hell out of them with a long, windy speech.
Synonyms
verbose, long-winded, wordy, prolix, lengthy, overlong, prolonged, protracted, long-drawn-out, tedious;
talkative, garrulous, voluble, loquacious;
rambling, meandering, repetitious, tautological, periphrastic, circumlocutory, tortuous
informal talky
rare pleonastic
4British informal (Of a person) nervous or anxious about something.It's a funny track and I like it, but it's funny because it works against the original Chuck D vocal, deflating it, making him sound a bit windy and stupid.
Synonyms
nervous, anxious, worried, apprehensive, on edge, edgy, tense, stressed, fretful, uneasy, jumpy, with one's stomach in knots;
frightened, scared, afraid, fearful
informal with butterflies in one's stomach, jittery, twitchy, trepidatious, in a state, uptight, in a stew, in a dither, all of a dither, in a sweat, in a flap, in a tizz/tizzy, all of a lather, het up, in a twitter
British informal strung up, stressy, all of a doodah
North American informal spooky, squirrelly, in a twit
Australian/New Zealand informal toey
dated overstrung
Derivatives
windily
- We made it safely to the low wall built by the mujahidin - Basyir and I exhaled windily - and hiked on to the peak, hopping across the ditch once or twice to the ancient boundary wall to look down into West Kabul.
- ‘It's most closely associated with U.S. President Warren Gamaliel Harding,’ writes Quinion, ‘who used it a lot and who was by all accounts the classic example of somebody who orates verbosely and windily.’
- Try to write too windily and the end result won't be worth reading.
windiness
- However, there were few buyers for the plots of land and the venture failed, probably because of the windiness of the site and inaccessibility of the shore.
- Loess is a fine-grained aeolian sediment, typically liberated by the grinding action of glaciers, which may be transported great distances and indicates both windiness and aridity.
- The volume of writing is enormous, these days, and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria.
Origin
Old English windig (see wind1, -y1).
Rhymes
windy2
/ˈwʌɪndi/adjective (windier, windiest)
(Of a road or river) following a curving or twisting course: the long windy path...
- The drive home through the windy roads was uneventful and we got back to the hotel by midnight.
- We proceeded down a windy country road, following the River Chew towards its source.
- Nothing was more amusing than standing inside the pivot point and seeing it twist and turn as the driver maneuvered through the windy streets of Kingston.