Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Mentally unbalanced; crazy.
- adj. Amusingly eccentric or unconventional.
- adj. Ridiculous or absurd: a dotty scheme.
- adj. Having a feeble or unsteady gait; shaky.
- adj. Obsessively infatuated or enamored.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Having dots; covered or characterized by dots: as, a low, dotty underwood.
- Of unsteady gait; feeble and tottering, as from stiffness or lameness: as, to be a little dotty on one's feet.
- Feeble-minded; silly.
Wiktionary
- adj. Having many dots.
- adj. Mildly insane or excessively preoccupied; often, senile.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Composed of, or characterized by, dots.
- adj. Unsteady in gait; hence, feeble; half-witted.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. informal or slang terms for mentally irregular
- adj. intensely enthusiastic about or preoccupied with
Etymologies
- Probably alteration of Scots dottle, silly, from Middle English doten, to dote.
Examples
“Yes | No | Report from bustinbass wrote 32 weeks 5 days ago this still aint the biggest bass ever hooked and landed, even though it was foul hooked while sight fishin "dotty" the 25 pound largemouth bass in 2005 came from lake dixon in california. sadly it was found dead not too long ago floating in the lake still weighin an impressive 19 pounds”
“She said it might be time to rethink the "dotty" system.”
“In the run-up to the election he described plans for an arbitration scheme to judge banks when they refuse lending to small businesses as "dotty" and politically motivated.”
The Guardian: Richard Lambert steps down early as CBI director general
“Re whether it's "dotty" to think that this story will affect votes -- I think that people who write blogs tend to overestimate their effect in elections to roughly the same extent that people who don't write blogs underestimate their effect.”
“Murtha couldn't really do anything about it even as Majority Leader, and he sounds kind of dotty, even if he's right.”
“Now the book is drawn in a kind of dotty pen-and-ink style that seemingly bears equal thanks to both Peter Sis and Paul O.”
“The talk was lively enough, -- about two new cases that had arrived that afternoon, the deer-hunting season that had just closed, bear tracks discovered on Bolton Hill near the lumber-camp, and a new piano that a friend had sent for the convalescent or "dotty" ward, as they called it.”
“But latterly, they tell me, he has become more interested in the nervous ward, -- what he calls the 'dotty' ward, -- where there are chiefly convalescent children or incurable nervous diseases of children.”
“Richard Lambert, CBI director general, described the proposal as "dotty" and declared "it will never see the light of day, is quite unworkable and pure political rhetoric.”
Telegraph.co.uk: news, business, sport, the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Sunday Telegraph
“dotty" when she tried to induce him to talk to her and tell her all he was doing out in the world of sunlight and sight, the world she could no longer know; she was "scotty" when she upbraided him, gently and lovingly, for needing so much questioning and inducing to talk.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘dotty’.
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Mots Fous
Describing the demented--as colorfully as possible.
bats in the belfry, out to lunch, daft, stark ravin' mad, unsound, barmy, nuts but nuts, barking, touched, cracked, doolally, potty and 22 more...
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Bonkers
crackers, barmy, half-baked, mental, unhinged, barking, cuckoo, cracked, nuts, mad, insane, touched and 24 more...
brtom -- Who is he if it's a fair question, Mrs Breen asked. Is he dotty?
Joyce, Ulysses, 8 Jan 3, 2007