frowsy

American  

[frou-zee] / ˈfraʊ zi /

Or frousy

adjective

frowsier, frowsiest

1. frowzy.

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Other Word Forms

• frowsiness
  noun
• frowsily
  adverb

Explanation

Someone who's frowsy looks like a slob. If you go to a job interview looking frowsy, you're less likely to get the job than if you comb your hair and wear a tidy suit. If you sleep in your clothes so that you can roll out of bed in the morning and walk right out the door to catch a bus for school, you're in danger of looking frowsy. Frowsy people are untidy and scruffy — sometimes even dirty, with unwashed hair and grubby fingernails. Frowsy and its variation frowzy probably come from the now-obsolete adjective frowsty, "having an unpleasant smell."

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

frowsy frowsiest

But it’s that second performance, a frowsy FBI agent named Terry Husk, that really stuns you, because it’s Jude Law, going darker than ever.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 6, 2024

She mentions 1989’s Steel Magnolias, in which she played a frowsy southern misfit behind thick, horn-rimmed specs.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 21, 2015

The lush mane was ratted and backcombed into a frowsy beehive, the kind in which hoodlums of legend used to conceal their razor blades.

From New York Times ● Jul. 27, 2011

There are the usual long-faced deacons, and two frowsy but folksy women who run the choir and the Baptist Young People's Union.

From Time Magazine Archive

I push past him into the cramped, frowsy cottage.

From "The Bletchley Riddle" by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin

Part mews, part warehouses, and all disreputable, the upper story of it, as it showed itself to me over the wall, held some of the frowsiest of London's horde.

From Lore of Proserpine by Hewlett, Maurice Henry

That is why the presentment of the latter may be seen up to this day on the frieze of a building in the frowsiest part of Paris.

From An Englishman in Paris Notes and Recollections by Albert D.