bedraggled
Americanadjective
adjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of bedraggled
Explanation
If you're bedraggled, you're dishevelled, limp, and tired. Many people are a bit bedraggled after a very long plane flight. New parents who spend much of the night awake with a crying baby often look a little bedraggled, and so do travelers and students during finals week. Bedraggled people haven't gotten enough sleep and aren't quite as pulled together and polished as they might like to be. Bedraggled is an 18th-century word, from the now-obsolete verb bedraggle, combining be and draggle, "make wet and dirty" or "lag behind."
Vocabulary lists containing bedraggled
Surviving Hitler
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Raining Cats and Dogs
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Uglies
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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.
Arriving in theaters this fall after multiple splashy film festival premieres, it announces the 38-year-old actress, best known for playing a bedraggled spy in the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses, as a potential Oscar contender.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 7, 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
"There's always people looking a little bedraggled who just want something filling and probably with a vegetable in it," Ayesha Kalaji, from restaurant Queen of Cups said.
From BBC ● Jun. 25, 2025
Hawkins lets herself get vulnerable, too, and the film never fakes a punch by pretending she’s anything more than a small, desperate and bedraggled woman with eyes that look like a bottomless well of need.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 29, 2025
Bree and Hwin had already got themselves as dirty and bedraggled as they could and it only remained to shorten their tails.
From "The Horse and His Boy" by C.S. Lewis
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
