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
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
The Old Lord stood there coughing and staring, a dirty grey satin robe wrapped about him, from which hung an edge of bedraggled fur.
From "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck
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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.
