feisty [L19th] A small farting dog is the surprising idea behind the word feisty, meaning ‘spirited and exuberant’, but originally meaning ‘aggressive, excitable’. It comes from the earlier and now obsolete word feist or fist meaning ‘small dog’, from fisting cur or fisting hound. This was a derogatory term for a lapdog, deriving from the old verb fist, meaning ‘to break wind’. Fist may also be the source of fizzle, which in the 16th century meant ‘to break wind quietly’. Fart itself goes back to Old English times and was formerly a more respectable word than it is now—Geoffrey Chaucer used it in The Canterbury Tales.