scraggy
Americanadjective
-
lean or scrawny
-
rough; unkempt
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of scraggy
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:
The soldiers call it a forest, though it's just a line of scraggy trees separating them from Russian positions.
From BBC ● Nov. 7, 2025
Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures of tall, elegantly scraggy humans loom large in people’s minds.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 19, 2022
Goat-horned half-demons with scraggy coats of fur, lolling tongues and threatening bundles of birch branches are no one’s idea of a welcome guest on a winter’s night.
From The Guardian ● Dec. 8, 2019
Unaccountably angry and smug, the scraggy Smithers is Brutus’s cynical, conniving cohort.
From The New Yorker ● Apr. 3, 2017
“With this brand, you will be of a gang too. The mangy, scraggy, sorry gang of Beast Riders.”
From "Beast Rider" by Tony Johnston & María Elena Fontanot de Rhoads
After leaving the timber-line, the riders found the scrub bushes grew scraggier and shorter, and finally the top of the peak was left as bare and craggy as any volcanic formation.
From Girl Scouts in the Rockies by Roy, Lillian Elizabeth
The old sailor, ignorant of Arabic feminine names, thought it a “misnomer”, for of all his she-persecutors she was the leanest and scraggiest.
From The Boy Slaves by Reid, Mayne
Then was he sparely clad, in garments of faded hue, tattered and dust-stained; his mount the scraggiest of mustangs—a very Rosinante.
From The Lost Mountain A Tale of Sonora by Reid, Mayne
He imagines 254 that he has demolished one quarter of the scraggiest hen in the hen-house.”
From A Very Naughty Girl by Meade, L. T.
He was the leanest, scraggiest long thing I have ever seen.
From The Mountebank by Locke, William John
“It’s the scraggiest part of the whole forest,—only fit for owls to live in!”
From The Joyous Story of Toto by Richards, Laura Elizabeth Howe
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.
