What it means
Dodgy, suspect, the kind of thing that makes the hair on your neck stand up. A sketchy alley, a sketchy link in your inbox, a sketchy bloke loitering by the cash machine. It covers anything that feels unsafe or untrustworthy, plus shaky quality, like a sketchy phone signal that drops every other word.
Usage examples
"That email asking for my bank details looked dead sketchy, so I binned it and changed my password anyway."
"We took a shortcut down a sketchy side street and walked a lot faster than usual."
"The hostel reviews were sketchy at best, so we paid a bit more and slept somewhere we could actually trust."
"That bloke kept hovering by the ticket machine acting all sketchy, so I waited for the next train with the crowd."
"The Wi-Fi in that Airbnb was sketchy as hell, kept cutting out every time I tried to join the call."
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Where it comes from
It grows out of sketch, which first meant a rough drawing or outline, borrowed into English in the 1600s from Greek skhedios by way of Italian schizzo. The shady sense took off much later in modern slang, where sketchy came to mean something that feels off, incomplete, or not safe to trust.
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