scraggy

English

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈskɹæɡi/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -æɡi

Adjective

scraggy (comparative scraggier, superlative scraggiest)

1. Rough and irregular; jagged.
   • c. 1890, William Dean Howells, Tennyson, stanza 18:

     Her tender arms the angry sharpness rue
     Of many a scraggy thorn and envious brier;

   • 1894, Gilbert Parker, chapter 10, in The Trail of The Sword:

     [H]e grasped the rock. It was scraggy, and though it tore and bruised him he clung to it.

2. Lean or thin, scrawny.
   • 1815 February 24, [Walter Scott], chapter 2, in Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; and Archibald Constable and Co., […], →OCLC:

     On one of these occasions, he presented for the first time to Mannering his tall, gaunt, awkward, bony figure, attired in a threadbare suit of black, with a coloured handkerchief, not over clean, about his sinewy, scraggy neck.

   • 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London, New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:

     He is twenty years younger, but has something of the same spare, scraggy physique.

Derived terms

• scraggily
• scragginess

Translations

very lean

• Bulgarian: мършав (bg) (mǎršav)
• Italian: scheletrico (it) m
• Ukrainian: сухорлявий m (suxorljavyj), захлялий m (zaxljalyj), худющий m (xudjuščyj)

References

• “scraggy”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.