Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. of a person, unpleasant, poss. criminal, generally distasteful.

1933		S. Walker Night Club Era 205: [C]auliflower ears, beggars, sleazy crones, skinny girls who would be out of place in even the cheapest dance hall.
1953		L. Uris Battle Cry (1964) 151: A heavily made-up, sleazy-looking bitch.
1955		E. Hoagland Cat Man 250: Then baby-blue-uniformed ushers with arrogant, I-know-my-way-around expressions—schleazy bastards grafting twenty bucks a day.
1967		Oz 6 3/2: Your two sleazy would-be exposers managed to invent so much other rubbish about us [etc.].
1975		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.
1976		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.
1977		E. Bunker Animal Factory 39: Make sure sleazy ass Preacher doesn’t run in a couple of bogus tickets.
1986		C. Hiaasen Tourist Season (1987) 247: I kicked his sleazy ass out when I caught him trying to tape-record me.
1986		P. Corris Deal Me Out [ebook] ‘[S]leazy stuff still goes on, always has, always will’.
1997		P. Corris Washington Club [ebook] ‘[U]sing your sleazy contacts to investigate Van Kep’.
1998		C. Fleming High Concept 133: I don’t understand why those sleazy bastards like whores so much.
2000		Guardian Rev. 14 Jan. 2: Sleazy private dicks.
2024		E. Wald Jelly Roll Blues 64: Ethel Waters [...] recalled the pimps in her Philadelphia neighborhood steering her away from their line of work, and contrasted them with the sleazy johns who considered any young Black woman potential prey.

2. perverse, sexually or otherwise.

1934		S. Walker City Editor 152: Some of the sleaziest writing anywhere is in American newspapers. Some of the best is there also.
1960		E. Hoagland Circle Home 181: Sitting in a schleazy movie while the pervert people took turns creeping up to put their pitch.
1972		E. Sanders Family 73: Death-trip [satanist] groups that must have provided powerful sleazo inputs into manson.
2002		in J. Bailey 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.
2004		M.B. ‘Chopper’ Read Chopper 3 4: Tanya was a sadistic whore and the whole thing was getting quite sleazy.
2012		(con. 1980s) I. Welsh 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.

1935		N. Algren ‘A Place to Lie Down’ in Texas Stories (1995) 62: The paw seized Mack’s shirt [...] with a yank which ripped the sleazy cloth down to the navel.
1949		R. Chandler Little Sister 82: The sleazy hamburger joints.
1959		J. Thompson Getaway in Four Novels (1983) 96: Old hands in the sleazy bypaths of crime, they could pretty well guess what had happened to her.
1960		C. Himes Big Gold Dream 190: A corner was curtained off for a clothes closet by a sleazy curtain.
1963		‘Geoffrey Tolhurst’ 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.
1963		M. Spillane Return of the Hood 42: They were glad to pinpoint him at a sleezy gin mill that featured a belly dancer.
1978		R. Caron Go-Boy! 62: I was still living in a cheap rooming house in a sleazy district.
1981		J. Ellroy 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.
2000		Observer Screen 9 Jan. 11: An innocent country boy moves into a sleazy hotel near Time Square.
2010		K. Richards Life 166: You were really in one of the sleaziest businesses there is, without actuallty being a gangster.

4. (US juv.) lucky.

1987

G.A. Fine With the Boys 169: Sleezy, adj. Lucky, often with the implication that the luck was undeserved (as in ‘sleezy catch’).