1(of food) no longer fresh and pleasant to eat; hard, musty, or dry.

1. 1.1No longer new and interesting or exciting.
   ‘their marriage had gone stale’
   More example sentences

   • ‘Youthful energy can make stale old artistic endeavours exciting.’
   • ‘Indoor gardens can transform a stale room into a vibrant living space.’
   • ‘He quotes five passages of bad English, in all of which he finds two common qualities: stale imagery and lack of precision.’
   • ‘Training programs get stale and boring after about a month of consistent workouts.’
   • ‘They were energetic and played an interesting style of music, but I found it very boring and stale.’
   • ‘You can enjoy this formula for a while - it does not really matter which bands you first became interested in, any will do - but it becomes stale.’
   • ‘As played by Jack Nicholson, he's a newly retired insurance actuary whose wife - in a stale, humdrum marriage - suddenly drops dead.’
   • ‘The same approach over and over can become stale and boring for the students as well as their art teacher.’
   • ‘Seriously, TV news may have been stale in the old days, but it was also respected.’
   • ‘The difficulties lie more in a plot that drags and characterizations that are rather stale.’
   • ‘The events of that day had given this stale slogan a vibrating urgency.’
   • ‘Yet far from being stale, her character comes across with freshness and believability.’
   • ‘Circus acts have grown so mundane, stale and outdated that animal acts are now the only way of attracting the publics' attention.’
   • ‘In the euphoria that surrounds the so-called mainstream, unemployment is stale news.’
   • ‘Yes I know you thought this matter was stale news but not for those who understand the ramifications for our democracy.’
   • ‘Even though I'm hearing it for the first time, it seems like stale news.’
   • ‘Director, Eisner, deserves credit, too, for delivering a film that seems fresh and exciting, rather than stale and formulaic.’
   • ‘News cycles are much shorter and the film will appear stale if released six months later elsewhere.’
   • ‘Max is very unhappy with the stale, dull, boring, routine life and wife; he feels they've played it too safe and he needs a little danger in his life.’
   • ‘I limp down the street to sweet black coffee where the morning news is old news by now and stale headlines trickle in the city with a heart of gold in a world at war in a laid-back state.’
   Synonyms

   hackneyed, tired, worn out, overworked, threadbare, warmed-up, banal, trite, stock, stereotyped, clichéd, run-of-the-mill, commonplace, platitudinous, unoriginal, derivative, unimaginative, uninspired, flat

   View synonyms
2. 1.2predicative (of a person) no longer able to perform well or creatively because of having done something for too long.
   ‘a top executive tends to get stale’
   More example sentences

   • ‘Originally, Kye was way more hotter in my mind, but when I wrote him, he turned into a worry-wart with a stale personality.’
   • ‘It didn't send its green reporters to war, nor did it leave its stale reporters at home.’
   • ‘I won't defend him because I think he's stale and isn't half the wrestler he once was.’
   • ‘‘I'd like to be able to pull back from the business before I get stale and grumpy,’ she said.’
   • ‘Simply, Le Guen believes every coach has a shelf-life of three or four years at any one club before he grows stale and people turn against him.’
   • ‘While his on-air persona should not grow stale, Mr. McMahon is not the character he used to be.’
   • ‘‘After three years as a mayor you tend to become a bit stale,’ Mr Windsor said.’
   • ‘For the past decade we've been getting 100 points per year but we thought that our team had become a little stale.’
   • ‘Even if you love what you're doing, it's almost inevitable that at some point you'll feel a little stale.’
   • ‘Agreeing with the five years in office rule, he admits to feeling a trifle stale in the last few terms.’
   • ‘I think you need that as a player, you do need new challenges, new people to learn from because you can go a bit stale.’
3. 1.3(of a cheque or legal claim) invalid because out of date.
   ‘justifications for adverse possession go beyond stale claims’
   More example sentences

   • ‘For example, it is frequently said that the doctrine is an embodiment of the policy that defendants should be protected from stale claims and that claimants should not sleep on their rights.’
   • ‘As I said at the outset of this judgment, the whole purpose of the Limitation Act is to ensure that claims are litigated promptly and that stale claims should be discouraged.’
   • ‘Counsel for the 1986 Trustee submits that the claims are stale, speculative, defensible and likely to fail.’
   • ‘The claim is very stale, but Mr Justice Ian Kennedy said in 1995 that the delays since 1993 were not the fault of either party.’
   • ‘The second defendants have had to deal with stale claims and have been handicapped by the absence of potentially relevant documents after the warehouse fire.’
   • ‘By contrast in the present case, the defendants are faced with a truly stale claim first made upon them five years after the event.’
   • ‘The makeweight argument worries about stale claims and evidence.’
   • ‘The committee was satisfied that sufficient remedies were available through the courts to protect traders from stale claims.’
   • ‘The courts should not be clogged with stale cases and parties should know that.’

Make or become stale.

(of an animal, especially a horse) urinate.