ramshackle
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈɹæmˌʃæk.əl/
enpr: rămʹshăk'əl
Forms: form: more ramshackle
form: most ramshackle
Etymology: First attested in 1830, a back-formation from ramshackled, from ransackled, past participle of ransackle (“to ransack”), frequentative of Middle English ransaken (“to pillage”).
Senses: examples: text: They stayed in a ramshackle cabin on the beach.
text: Steady old Curés come jolting past, now and then, in such ramshackle, rusty, musty, clattering coaches as no Englishman would believe in;[…]
ref: 1846, Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy, London: […] Bradbury & Evans, […], →OCLC:
text: There came […] my lord the cardinal, in his ramshackle coach.
ref: 1854, Arthur Pendennis [pseudonym; William Makepeace Thackeray], The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, volume I, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], →OCLC, page 347:
text: I called for the cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse.
ref: 1889, Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat […] :
text: A ramshackle old empire. (of Austria-Hungary).
ref: 1914, David Lloyd George, (Please provide the book title or journal name):
text: The villa was a roomy white house, which, as is the case with most continental houses, looked to an English eye frail, ramshackle, and absurdly frivolous, more like a pagoda in a tea-garden than a place where one slept.
ref: 1915, Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, London: Duckworth & Co., […], →OCLC:
text: When they got out of the Gare du Nord, and trundled along the cobbled streets in a ramshackle, noisy cab, it seemed to him that he was breathing a new air so intoxicating that he could hardly restrain himself from shouting aloud.
ref: 1915, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XXXVIII, in Of Human Bondage, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, →OCLC:
glosses: In disrepair or disorder; poorly maintained; lacking upkeep, usually of buildings or vehicles.
examples: text: So ramshackle was the locals' attempt at defence that, with energetic wingers pouring into the space behind panicked full-backs and centre-halves dizzied by England's movement, it was cruel to behold at times.
ref: 2012 September 7, Dominic Fifield, “England start World Cup campaign with five-goal romp against Moldova”, in The Guardian:
text: The alliance that pushed the Inflation Reduction Act into law in August was always a somewhat fragile and ramshackle one: Green New Dealers and the coal-state senator Joe Manchin, carbon-capture geeks and environmental justice warriors, all herded together in the sort of big-tent play you get with a 50-50 Senate and one party functionally indifferent on climate.
ref: 2022 October 5, David Wallace-Wells, “Progressives Should Rally Around a Clean Energy Construction Boom”, in The New York Times:
glosses: Badly or carelessly organized.
Synonyms: word: shabby
word: tacky
word: scroungy
word: beat
word: beat up
word: beaten up
word: bedraggled
word: broken-down
word: crumbling
word: derelict
word: dilapidated
word: draggled
word: neglected
word: ramshackle
word: ruinous
word: run-down
word: seedy
word: tatterdemalion
word: timeworn
word: tumbledown
Hypernyms: word: abandoned
word: cheerless
word: dangerous
word: deteriorated
word: broken
word: jagged
word: tattered
Hyponyms: word: rickety