bedraggle
Americanverb (used with object)
verb
Etymology
Origin of bedraggle
Explanation
Bedraggle is a verb that means to make disheveled, wet, and dirty. Rain and mud bedraggle children who go tromping through the outdoors in their dressiest clothes right before family pictures. Bedraggle is a word that was probably very common in the early 1700s when people started using it. If a lady walked along the old, unpaved streets, it would bedraggle the bottom of her hoop skirt, and a gentleman might have set his coat down for her to walk on. Today we're more likely to use verbs like drench or soil instead, and, for the most part, to wear more sensible clothes.
Vocabulary lists containing bedraggle
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The House of the Spirits
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Copper Sun
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Instead of cultivating your graces you bedraggle them with labor!
From For Gold or Soul? The Story of a Great Department Store by Lurana W. Sheldon
Here in town, she probably preferred to tread the extent of the two drawing-rooms, and measure out the miles by spaces of forty feet, rather than bedraggle her skirts over the sloppy pavements.
From The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
But no blast can chill its wings, no mire bedraggle, or rude touch fray.
From Sister Dolorosa and Posthumous Fame by James Lane Allen
But Mathews had no Judge Lawlack to bedraggle justice for his sake.
From The Squatter and the Don by C. Loyal
Florida is in the midst of its worst drought in 25 years, but the dry spell actually ranked far down on the list of challenges these bedraggled growers were facing.
From Slate ● Apr. 20, 2026
His two main characters, infantrymen named Willie and Joe, were bedraggled, unshaven, dirty, tired to the bone, contemptuous of authority—in other words, mirror images of many of the real soldiers fighting that war.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 5, 2026
Her over-romanticized vision of life across the pond, fueled by love stories like “Sense and Sensibility” set in pastoral England, starts out more bedraggled than charmed.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 10, 2025
The final scoreline almost did a kindness to a bedraggled Inter, such was PSG's dominance and the sheer number of chances they created.
From BBC ● May 31, 2025
A bedraggled figure slowly made his way up the front steps of our building and appeared at our apartment door.
From "The Boy on the Wooden Box" by Leon Leyson
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
