icky
/ˈɪki
/(also ikky)
adjective (ickier, ickiest) informal
1Unpleasantly sticky.After a bunch of hot, humid, icky sticky days, it was pure bliss....
- She was covered from head to foot with icky brown mud and her hair was sticking up on all ends.
- It's grey outside, it's stopped raining, but by god it would be nice if it could start again, just to take some of the nasty icky wet hot stickiness away.
1.1Nasty or unpleasant: the kids were eating something icky...
- Boys are so icky but also strangely interesting to me.
- In a matter of a couple of months, dating had taken me back to grade school when all boys were icky and cooties were a very real threat.
- Why couldn't it be like the good old days where I thought boys were icky and all that jazz?
1.2Distastefully sentimental: a romantic subplot that is just plain icky...
- Damn I need to stay away from mom, between her and Kristen reading me passages out of her mushy icky, teen romance novels.
- She smiled a sticky, icky, saccharine smile at us and pulled out the pencil from her ear.
- Diana's estate sues them because… well, it's kitsch and tacky and maudlin and icky, isn't it?
Derivatives
ickiness
- And that particular ickiness about the flag - which afflicts even practical leftists who have no qualms about power or working within the system - is a big part of what's holding us back from that goal.
- And the sophomores wander into the debate and decide based on their level of ickiness or decide that one term fits all under the law of God.
- I had only written about one thousand words yesterday when I had to stop due to a rare headache and a general feeling of ickiness.
Origin
1930s: perhaps related to sick1 or to the child's word ickle.