sleazy adj.
1. of a person, unpleasant, poss. criminal, generally distasteful.
![]() | Night Club Era 205: [C]auliflower ears, beggars, sleazy crones, skinny girls who would be out of place in even the cheapest dance hall. | |
![]() | Battle Cry (1964) 151: A heavily made-up, sleazy-looking bitch. | |
![]() | Cat Man 250: Then baby-blue-uniformed ushers with arrogant, I-know-my-way-around expressions—schleazy bastards grafting twenty bucks a day. | |
![]() | Oz 6 3/2: Your two sleazy would-be exposers managed to invent so much other rubbish about us [etc.]. | |
![]() | Manchester Guardian Weekly 2 Aug. 20: Her sleazo routines seem half-rehearsed. Her dirty jokes sound almost like last-gasp fill-ins for the cleaner lines she was supposed to deliver but forgot. | |
![]() | Tel. (Brisbane) 3 Aug. 10/3: When I made the mistake of calling them ‘sleazy’ to their faces, their reaction was outrage. ‘Don’t call me a sleaze,’ said Miss Currie. | |
![]() | Animal Factory 39: Make sure sleazy ass Preacher doesn’t run in a couple of bogus tickets. | |
![]() | Tourist Season (1987) 247: I kicked his sleazy ass out when I caught him trying to tape-record me. | |
![]() | High Concept 133: I don’t understand why those sleazy bastards like whores so much. | |
![]() | Guardian Rev. 14 Jan. 2: Sleazy private dicks. |
2. perverse, sexually or otherwise.
![]() | City Editor 152: Some of the sleaziest writing anywhere is in American newspapers. Some of the best is there also. | |
![]() | Circle Home 181: Sitting in a schleazy movie while the pervert people took turns creeping up to put their pitch. | |
![]() | Family 73: Death-trip [satanist] groups that must have provided powerful sleazo inputs into manson. | |
![]() | in | Conversations in a Brothel 125: It’s not a sleazy industry. Sleazy people exist, but I am not a sleazy person and this is not a sleazy joint.|
![]() | Chopper 3 4: Tanya was a sadistic whore and the whole thing was getting quite sleazy. | |
![]() | (con. 1980s) Skagboys 273: Ah’ve goat a belter ah a hard-on n she looks as sexy and sleazy as fuck. |
3. of a thing, dirty, run-down, decayed.
![]() | Texas Stories (1995) 62: The paw seized Mack’s shirt [...] with a yank which ripped the sleazy cloth down to the navel. | ‘A Place to Lie Down’ in|
![]() | Little Sister 82: The sleazy hamburger joints. | |
![]() | Getaway in Four Novels (1983) 96: Old hands in the sleazy bypaths of crime, they could pretty well guess what had happened to her. | |
![]() | Big Gold Dream 190: A corner was curtained off for a clothes closet by a sleazy curtain. | |
![]() | Flat 4 King’s Cross (1966) 98: Inside the sleazy, untidy room a man was sitting in an armchair, without a collar on, reading the racing results. | |
![]() | Return of the Hood 42: They were glad to pinpoint him at a sleezy gin mill that featured a belly dancer. | |
![]() | Go-Boy! 62: I was still living in a cheap rooming house in a sleazy district. | |
![]() | Brown’s Requiem 15: [I was] putting the arm on some counter-culture bimbo for her sleazy bus. [Ibid.] 158: He’s got this hotel and bar that he owns. Really a sleazo racket. | |
![]() | Observer Screen 9 Jan. 11: An innocent country boy moves into a sleazy hotel near Time Square. | |
![]() | Life 166: You were really in one of the sleaziest businesses there is, without actuallty being a gangster. |
4. (US juv.) lucky.
![]() | With the Boys 169: Sleezy, adj. Lucky, often with the implication that the luck was undeserved (as in ‘sleezy catch’). |