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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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
But Mathews had no Judge Lawlack to bedraggle justice for his sake.
From The Squatter and the Don by C. Loyal
But no blast can chill its wings, no mire bedraggle, or rude touch fray.
From Sister Dolorosa and Posthumous Fame by James Lane Allen
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
Mary is bedraggled and wet, begging for a gown for a comeback performance in a few days.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 17, 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
But on what criteria, using what metrics, should the bedraggled managers—who have never had to do this before—make the trade-offs now?
From Slate ● Nov. 8, 2025
But bedraggled residents who spoke to the BBC near Lacey last week said they felt the workers' absence during the strike.
From BBC ● Jul. 26, 2025
It was emaciated and bedraggled, with a few shredded orange feathers along its arms.
From "Dactyl Hill Squad" by Daniel José Older
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.
