dotty
/ˈdɒti
/adjective (dottier, dottiest) British informal
1Eccentric or slightly mad: a dotty old lady...
- I want to see those great windows again; it's 25 years since I was last there: a dingy neoclassical mansion with two elderly Gore-Booth sisters and a slightly dotty and antique brother showing visitors around.
- The Suimin, or sleep room, is one of those slightly dotty inventions that the Japanese seem to specialise in, a hi-tech bedroom that offers sleep-deprived Tokyoites at least a few minutes of unbroken slumber.
- They do it on purpose, I know they do, so as firmly to establish your new status as a slightly dotty old age pensioner, grateful for anything you can get but never quite understanding it, and completely uncertain about everything.
1.1 (dotty about) Infatuated with: she’s dotty about her husband...
- Indeed, one might say the king was a bit dotty about these handsome little dogs, who were invariably black and tan and who graced the paintings of Titian, Van Dyck and other artists.
- Are you a US-based S&T reader who is dotty about soccer?
- My Mum is dotty about sheep.
Derivatives
dottily
- That is the question being asked at this most prestigious of festivals, after a long series of productions of operas by the town's most famous son that at best must be counted perverse and at worst dottily destructive.
- In the way is one of his long series of dottily philosophical villains who controls a mine where the workers are badly exploited.
- The last section is outtakes, titled, charmingly if a little dottily, ‘A Lagniappe for the Reader.’
dottiness
/ noun ...- He evidently conceived something English in his dottiness; he is described as ‘un vrai gentleman ‘and there are Anglophile touches such as holidaymakers crowding to get the latest Daily Telegraph.’
- Even California can't compete with this kind of dottiness.
- But this verdict, arrived at by the 600 experts, contains the same level of dottiness at play in all the other crass errors of judgement on the list.
Origin
Late 19th century: perhaps from obsolete dote 'simpleton, fool', apparently from Dutch dote 'folly'.