Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Untidy; bedraggled.
Wiktionary
- adj. of a person or other animal Slatternly, untidy, unkempt.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Untidy; sluttish; slatternly.
Etymologies
- Taken from draggle (meaning a net drawn along the bottom of the water for fishing) this was originally applied to women whose dresses dragged along the ground behind them. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“Add to this a dirty, draggle-tailed chintz; long, matted hair, wandering into her eyes, and over her lean shoulders, which were once so snowy, and you have the picture of drunkenness and Mrs. Simon Gambouge.”
“People go by, so drenched and draggle-tailed that I have often wondered how they found the heart to undress.”
“And then there is the feeling that that kind of semi-poverty, which has in itself something of the pleasantness of independence, when it is borne by a man alone, entails the miseries of a draggle-tailed and querulous existence when it is imposed on a woman who has in her own home enjoyed the comforts of affluence.”
“Women with brown faces and draggle-tailed coats and turbans, and wondering eyes, and no stays, and blue beads and gold coins hanging round their necks, came to gaze, as they passed, upon the fair neat”
“So, also, on being asked by a poor writer what was the most profitable mode of exercising the pen, “My dear fellow,” replied he, good-humoredly, “pay no regard to the draggle-tailed muses; for my part I have found productions in prose much more sought after and better paid for.””
“The Angel of Light generally appeared in form� pauperis, though there was always about him a tinge of bright azure which was hardly compatible with the draggle-tailed hue of everyday poverty.”
“If I was never to rank in her eyes as anything but a nonentity, it would not greatly matter if I figured as a draggle-tailed cockerel, and the Baron were to give me a good thrashing; but, the fact was that”
“But, however much she might whistle, she should see that I was at least no draggle-tailed cockerel!”
“Lent-preachers, your little draggle-tailed father confessors, who during all that time of their reign damn all husbands that run astray three fathom and a half below the very lowest pit of hell.”
Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel
“The Angel of Light generally appeared in formâ pauperis, though there was always about him a tinge of bright azure which was hardly compatible with the draggle-tailed hue of everyday poverty.”
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