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PlainSpell

fust

/fʌst/noun, verb

fust is a noun meaning “A strong musty smell; mustiness” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-U-S-T and has one syllable, and it appears about once in every 23 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of fust is fusts.

What does fust mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A strong musty smell; mustiness.

  2. 2

    The shaft (main body) of a column.

  3. 3

    A type of small galley.

verb

  1. 1

    obsoleteTo turn mouldy, to decay.

  2. 2

    Of wine: to acquire an undesirable musty or woody taste from the cask in which it is stored.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce fust?

  • US /fʌst/
  • /fʊst/

Fust has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-fust.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of fust

  • fusts plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • fusting participle, present
  • fusted participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is fust?

Fust appears about once in every 23 million words in written English, the 145,125th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Fust in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense type of small galley:

LanguageWords
Portuguesefusta

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does fust come from?

From Middle English fust, from Old French fust (“wood; bole, tree trunk”) (modern French fût), from Latin fūstis (“knobbed stick, cudgel, club”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *bʰew- (“to hit”) or *gʷʰen- (“to strike; to kill, slay”).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).