scraggly

As if from a verb *scraggle (in turn from scrag).

• IPA^(key): /ˈskɹæɡ(ə)li/

• Audio (Southern England)

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scraggly (comparative scragglier, superlative scraggliest)

1. Rough, scruffy, or unkempt.
   • 1913 August, Jack London, chapter XXXI, in John Barleycorn, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC, page 280:

     The sunburn of my face, what little of it could be seen through a scraggly growth of beard, had faded to a sickly yellow.

   • 1963, J P Donleavy, A Singular Man, published 1963 (USA), page 24:

     Faintly from the street scraggly children's voices singing a yule song. Miss Tomson going to the window.
     "Hey come here Mr Smith look at this, isn't that sweet, group of urchins, they're singing."

   • 1980 November 24, John Skow, “In Arizona: A Million Dollar Sale of Cowboy Art”, in Time:

     What he painted was scenes of the Old West, cowboys and Indians, cattle and horses. Pictures scraggly with sagebrush.

2. Jagged or uneven; scraggy.
   • 1916, Annie Fellows Johnston, chapter 24, in Georgina of the Rainbows:

     She would be so happy . . . that she wouldn't notice the spelling or the scraggly writing.

   • 2001 September 7, Christopher John Farley, “At the MTV Awards: Redheads and Circuses”, in Time:

     "I have no idea," the young woman said, checking over the scraggly illegible signature the mystery woman had left her in her autograph book.

   • 2005, Sean Dooley, The Big Twitch, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, page 285:

     I climbed to a small ridge under a fiercely blazing sun and sat down under a scraggly gum tree to try and work out my bearings.

• scraggliness