bedraggled
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /bɪˈdɹæɡl̩d/
Forms: form: more bedraggled
form: most bedraggled
Etymology: From bedraggle + -ed.
Senses: examples: text: A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea.
ref: 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “The Chase.—Third Day.”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC, page 627:
text: She came at night, and in a storm, with only two attendants, and stood before a peasant’s hut, tired, bedraggled, soaked with rain, “the red print of her lost crown still girdling her brow,” and implored admittance—and was refused!
ref: 1880, Mark Twain [pseudonym] (Samuel L[anghorne] Clemens), “”, in A Tramp Abroad; […], Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company; London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC, pages 532 and 535:
text: No three tramps that one could have met in a Surrey lane could have looked more hopeless and bedraggled.
ref: 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter XIV, in The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:
text: As a rule he was neat in his person, but now his clothes were in disorder. He looked suddenly bedraggled. I was convinced he had been drinking, and I smiled.
ref: 1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XXVIII, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC:
text: Finally delivering “Room on Fire,” the follow-up to their much ballyhooed debut album, the well-heeled but stylishly bedraggled locals try to dispel accusations of one-trick-ponyism.
ref: 2003, The New Yorker, page 17:
synonyms: word: bedraggled
word: blowsy
word: dishevelled
word: dowdy
word: dowdyish
word: down at heel
word: downgone
word: qualifier
word: draggle-tailed
word: draggled
word: frowsy
word: frumpy
word: grotty
word: grufty
word: grungy
word: hashy
word: mangy
word: mean
word: out at the heels
word: piggy
word: ragtag
word: ribby
word: schleppy
word: schlumpy
word: scratty
word: scrofulous
word: scroungy
word: scruffy
word: scrungy
word: seedy
word: shabby
word: slammocky
word: slatternly
word: slobbish
word: slobby
word: sloppy
word: slovenlike
word: slovenly
word: slummocky
word: sluttish
word: tacky
word: tore up
word: trampish
word: unfine
word: unkemmed
word: unkempt
word: unshaven
glosses: Wet and limp; unkempt.
examples: text: She is only coming to gloat over my bedraggled and flowerless borders and to sing the praises of her own detestably over-cultivated garden. I'm sick of being told that it's the envy of the neighbourhood; it's like everything else that belongs to her—her car, her dinner-parties, even her headaches, they are all superlative; no one else ever had anything like them.
ref: 1919, Saki [pseudonym; Hector Hugh Munro], “The Occasional Garden”, in R[othay] R[eynolds], editor, The Toys of Peace and Other Papers. […], London: John Lane, The Bodley Head […], →OCLC, page 239:
text: It was a tall, shabby building, that cannot have been painted for years, and it had so bedraggled an air that the houses on each side of it looked neat and clean.
ref: 1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XI, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC:
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
glosses: Decaying, decrepit or dilapidated.
Derived terms: bedraggledly
bedraggledness
unbedraggled
Related terms: bedraggle
draggled
draggle-tail
draggle-tailed