bedraggled
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Etymology
Pronunciation
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /bɪˈdɹæɡl̩d/
Audio (General Australian): (file) - Hyphenation: be‧drag‧gled
Adjective
bedraggled (comparative more bedraggled, superlative most bedraggled)
- Wet and limp; unkempt.
- Synonyms: see Thesaurus:unkempt
- 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:
- 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.
- 1880, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter XLVI, in A Tramp Abroad; […], Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company; London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC:
- 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!
- 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter XIV, in The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:
- No three tramps that one could have met in a Surrey lane could have looked more hopeless and bedraggled.
- 1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XXVIII, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC:
- 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.
- 2003, The New Yorker, page 17:
- 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.
- Decaying, decrepit or dilapidated.
- Synonyms: see Thesaurus:ramshackle
- 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:
- 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.
- 1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XI, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC:
- 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.
Derived terms
Related terms
Translations
unkempt
|
decaying, dilapidated
|
Verb
bedraggled
- simple past and past participle of bedraggle.
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