1 (of food, especially bread and cake) no longer fresh and therefore unpleasant to eat
2 (of air, smoke, etc.) no longer fresh; smelling unpleasant:
stale cigarette smoke * stale sweat
3 something that is stale has been said or done too many times before and is no longer interesting or exciting:
stale jokes / news * Their marriage had gone stale.
4 a person who is stale has done the same thing for too long and so is unable to do it well, feel enthusiastic about it or produce any new ideas:
After ten years in the job, she felt stale and needed a change. * The cast is changed regularly to stop the actors from getting stale.
staleness noun [U]
\
Rate this entry
About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for stale is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is stale a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, stale is tagged as adjective.
Does stale appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — stale appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
