crispy (adj.)

Old English crisp "curly, crimped, wavy" (of hair, wool, etc.) from Latin crispus "curled, wrinkled, having curly hair," from PIE root *sker- (2) "to turn, bend."

It began to mean "brittle" 1520s, for obscure reasons, perhaps based on what happens to flat things when they are cooked. Sense of "neat, brisk, having a fresh appearance" (1814) is perhaps a figurative use, or perhaps a separate word. Of air, "chill, bracing" by 1869.

As a noun from mid-14c., originally the name of a light, crinkly material formerly used for kerchiefs, veils, etc.; late 14c. as a kind of pastry. By 1826 as "overdone piece of anything cooked" (as in burned to a crisp). Potato crisps (now the British version of U.S. potato chips, but not originally exclusively British) is by 1897; as simply crisps by 1935. In U.S., crisps began to be used by 1903 in trade names of breakfast cereals. Related: Crisply; crispness.

adjective suffix, "full of or characterized by," from Old English -ig, from Proto-Germanic *-iga- (source also of Dutch, Danish, German -ig, Gothic -egs), from PIE -(i)ko-, adjectival suffix, cognate with elements in Greek -ikos, Latin -icus (see -ic).

Originally added to nouns in Old English; it was used from 13c. with verbs, and by 15c. with other adjectives (for example crispy).

Variant forms in -y for short, common adjectives (vasty, hugy) helped poets keep step with classical feet when the grammatically empty but metrically useful -e dropped off such words in late Middle English. To replace it, by Elizabethan times, verse-writers had adapted to -y forms, and often it was done artfully, as in Sackville's "The wide waste places, and the hugy plain." Simple huge plain would have been a metrical balk.

After Coleridge's criticism of the -y forms as archaic artifice, poets gave up stilly (Moore probably was last to get away with it, with "Oft in the Stilly Night"), paly (which Keats and Coleridge himself had used) and the rest. Jespersen ("Modern English Grammar," 1954) also lists bleaky (Dryden), bluey, greeny, and other color words, lanky, plumpy, stouty, and the slang rummy. Vasty survived, he said, only in imitation of Shakespeare; cooly and moisty (Chaucer, hence Spenser) he regarded as fully obsolete. But in a few cases he notes (haughty, dusky) they seem to have supplanted the shorter forms.