musty vs smelly

musty

adj
  • Having an odour or taste of mould; also (generally), having a stale or unfresh odour or taste. 

  • Affected by dampness or mould; damp, mildewed, mouldy. 

  • Characteristic of or relating to mould or mouldiness. 

  • Of attitudes, ideas, writing, or other abstract things: no longer fresh or interesting; outdated, stale. 

  • Of a person: boring and unadventurous; also, old-fashioned, stuck in the past. 

  • Bad-tempered, grumpy, irritable. 

  • Of a male animal such as a camel or an elephant: in musth. 

smelly

adj
  • Having a bad smell. 

  • Having signs that suggest a design problem; having a code smell. 

  • Having a quality that arouses suspicion. 

noun
  • a Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifle or one of its derivatives. 

How often have the words musty and smelly occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )