Adjective
Soiled and wet as by dragging in the mud.
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Then wet umbrellas began to appear, draggled skirts, and mud.
More examples (1)
They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank—the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable.
Having a limp, miserable, dilapidated appearance; bedraggled.
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More examples (1)
1765, Tobias Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy, Letter 34, Nice, 2 April, 1765, It was near ten at night, when we entered the auberge in such a draggled and miserable condition, that Mrs. Vanini almost fainted at sight of us, on the supposition that we had met with some terrible disaster, and that the rest of the company were killed.
Under the portico, with its grey sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of draggled bareheaded girls, waiting for the auction to be over.
More examples (3)
Here, in front, the deserted street was white and black and silent, under the electric lamps. All the lonelier for two wretched gamins, counting their dirty sous, and draggled newspapers.
Wet straw was in his draggled beard; he was so sore and stiff, so bruised and buffeted he could hardly stand or stumble through the shallow water to lie groaning on the shore.
By the late nineteenth century British goshawks were extinct. I have a photograph of the stuffed remains of one of the last birds to be shot; a black-and-white snapshot of a bird from a Scottish estate, draggled, stuffed and glassy-eyed.
Adjective
limp and soiled as if dragged in the mud
- Synonyms
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the beggar's bedraggled clothes
scarecrows in battered hats or draggled skirts