Word: scrabbly Part of Speech: adj Etymology: From scrabble + -y. 1. Characterised by scrabbling, or digging around. Example: Once they were young and little and rather "scrabbly." They were given to loud laughter, to whispers, to scribbling pictures, and to mischievous glances. Example: With their carapace they survive the ordeal of the nets, frisking into scrabbly action as soon as they can. 2. Covered in loose rocks or crumbling soil. Example: My mount struggled up the last few feet of scrabbly rock. Example: She listened hard while she took the horse there but its hooves plodding across the scrabbly hard clay ground drowned out all other sounds. 3. Difficult to negotiate; requiring scrambling. Example: The button was a bit awkward for some people's thumbs - big, beefy thumbs found it on the small side, while long, elegant nails found it rather scrabbly. Example: The trail from Hannegan Peak down to Hannegan Pass is steep, scrabbly, and not maintained. 4. Scribbly. Example: The lines of the devices were very scrabbly, and the blue was muddy, and the red was a streaky pink, and Eddy looked very doubtfully at them; Example: I'm not such a very good hand at readin', and this here's such a scrabbly hand. 5. Thrown together; disorganized or slapdash. Example: After a rather scrabbly lunch, eaten with all the children sprawling over the table — they are brick red in colour and have tight rings of black hair and beady eyes — I walked out with my host and hostess in the rain... Example: He had to learn to climb a ship's rigging; spend many hours aloft, sometimes in bad weather; scrub decks; risk his life chasing whales; eat scrabbly food; sleep in a dank, crowded forecastle. 6. Of poor quality; poorly maintained. Example: He remembered it well — the scrabbly coloured boats, drawn on to the shingle, painted and chipped with religious legends, the big kerosene lamps, the black nets. Example: We are having dinner next to a mansion with scrabbly peeling paint and vermilion drapes in the windows. 7. Characterized by sparse, stunted vegetation, infertile. Example: The warm climate must make those qualities grow as abundantly as the vegetation — and all from a scrabbly soil. Example: On a scrabbly patch of land outside the shack, oil drums stand on open fires. 8. Stunted. Example: We followed a well-worn trail that led across windswept slopes, punctuated with scrabbly vegetation and weathered boulders and dotted with occasional stone-and-mud huts with thatched roofs. Example: His feet dragged through the small, scrabbly bushes that dotted the stretch of land sloping up from Jesik's house, each impact sparking a fresh explosion of seed-pods, sticks, and insects. 9. Sparse and scraggly. Example: Seen in the darkness, it was that of an evil-looking, thick-set savage, with a forbidding countenance dotted unevenly with scrabbly wisps of beard. Example: Tim traced the voice to a tall, suspendered gentleman in thick glasses with a scrabbly grey-white beard and introduced himself. 10. Impoverished, hardscrabble Example: And there was the whole valley spread out down below us, the brown river looking blue and the fields that were so rusty-poor, close up, a fine green from that distance, and even our house with its scrabbly yard looking like a pretty little farm. Example: He had lost an arm serving with Nelson at Trafalgar, and after the great three-deckers he was used to, the scrabbly little collection of craft on Lake Erie must have seemed very modest to him. 11. Rough, poor and uncultured. Example: The modern mariner who fells his shipmate with a blow of the fist is vastly more interesting a study when he is theoretically one of the highest products of our vaunted civilization than when he is just a scrabbly deck-hand under Drake. Example: It was such a blessing that there were other beings beside hard, scrabbly, warring men, people who need not be afraid to be soft, women with pretty eyes. 12. Having a rough texture; scratchy. Example: I 'd hate to feel their scrabbly feet, wouldn't you? Example: Actually, I know little of corn, except for the liquid variety... but I do know that the hard, ugly, scrabbly stuff in the center is the cob ~ and without that, we don't have the pretty stuff on the surface -- and that's what this award is all about.