1. Faint, sickly, languid. In later use chiefly: Inclined to swoon.
1530. Tindale, Pract. Prelates, Wks. II. 257. Faith waxed feeble and fainty, love waxed cold, the Scripture waxed dark.
1586. Cogan, Haven Health, lxix. (1636), 78. If a man use much Saffron, it will make him very fainty.
1648. Gage, West Ind., xvi. (1655), 109. I presently found my stomach fainty.
1697. Dryden, Virg. Georg., II. 431.
| The fainty Root can take no steady hold. | |
| Ibid. (1700), Fables, Flower & Leaf, 381. | |
| The fainty Knights were scorch’d; and knew not where | |
| To run for Shelter, for no Shade was near. |
1796. Coleridge, in Mrs. Sandford, T. Poole & Friends (1888), I. 177. It [an intolerable pain] continued from one in the morning till half-past five, and left me pale and fainty.
1855. Singleton, Virgil, I. 295.
| All hands, forewearied, have forsaken me, | |
| And with a spring their fainty frames have flung | |
| Upon the earth, or given them to the fires. |
1884. Holland, Chester Gloss., s.v. Aitch.… Fainty aitches are fainting fits.
2. Causing or productive of faintness; sickly.
1590. T. Watson, Eglogue Death Sir F. Walsingham, 276 (Arb.), 155.
| Who shall recure their faintie maladies, | |
| and purge their fleeces in soft running streams? |
1600. Abp. Abbot, An Exposition upon the Prophet Jonah (1613), 579–80. A faintie sultrie blowing, which might open the pores apace, and prouoke sweat in great plentie, might without any kind of miracle, effect what is here spoken.
1683. Tryon, Way to Health, 86. They are apt to sweat much, whence proceeds a fainty Indisposition, especially when the Sun and Year declines.
Hence † Faintiness.
1683. Tryon, Way to Health, 31. Green Corn or Grass … makes such Cattle heavy and dull, and great Bellies, apt to faintyness and Diseases. Ibid., 593. Feather-Beds … causing a general Faintiness to attend the whole Body.
