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.
“Pharmacy Chronicles” has some bedraggled wisdom to it.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 14, 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
Dressed in drab black, with his mariner cap pulled low and his dark hair framing his lean face, he resembled a bedraggled crow.
From "The City Beautiful" by Aden Polydoros
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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.
