Origin and history of weepy

Middle English wepen, "express sorrow, grief, or anguish by outcry;" from Old English wepan "shed tears, cry; bewail, mourn over; complain" (class VII strong verb; past tense weop, past participle wopen), from Proto-Germanic *wopjan (source also of Old Norse op, Old High German wuof "shout, shouting, crying," Old Saxon wopian, Gothic wopjan "to shout, cry out, weep").

This is reconstructed to be from PIE *wab- "to cry, scream" (source also of Latin vapulare "to be flogged;" Old Church Slavonic vupiti "to call," vypu "gull").

Over time the sense in English became limited toward "shed tears." In Middle English breste a-wepe was "burst into tears." By 1590s or "to drop or flow as tears." Of stones, walls, etc., "give out moisture, be damp," from c. 1400. Related: Wept; weeping.

very common adjective suffix, "full of, covered with, or characterized by" the thing expressed by the noun, Middle English -i, from Old English -ig, from Proto-Germanic *-iga-, from PIE -(i)ko-, adjectival suffix, cognate with elements in Greek -ikos, Latin -icus (see -ic). Germanic cognates include Dutch, Danish, German -ig, Gothic -egs.

It was used from 13c. with verbs (drowsy, clingy), and by 15c. with other adjectives (crispy). Chiefly with monosyllables; with more than two the effect tends to become comedic.

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Variant forms in -y for short, common adjectives (vasty, hugy) helped poets after the loss of grammatically empty but metrically useful -e in late Middle English. Verse-writers adapted to -y forms, often artfully, as in Sackville's "The wide waste places, and the hugy plain." (and the huge plain would have been a metrical balk).

After Coleridge's criticism of it as archaic artifice, poets gave up stilly (Moore probably was last to make it work, 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 survives, he writes, only in imitation of Shakespeare; cooly and moisty (Chaucer, hence Spenser) he regards as fully obsolete. But in a few cases he notes (haughty, dusky) they seem to have supplanted shorter forms.