bedraggled meaning: definition, etymology and quotations

bedraggled

adj

UK /bɪˈdɹæɡl̩d/

Etymology From bedraggle + -ed.

Wet, limp, and unkempt; in disarray due to being doused with water, exposed to the elements, etc.

A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea.1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “The Chase.—Third Day.”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC, page 627:
She came at night, and in a storm, with only two attendants, and stood before a peasant’s hut, tired, bedraggled, soaked with rain, “the red print of her lost crown still girdling her brow,” and implored admittance—and was refused!1880, Mark Twain [pseudonym] (Samuel L[anghorne] Clemens), “”, in A Tramp Abroad; […], Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company; London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC, pages 532 and 535:

3 more examples

No three tramps that one could have met in a Surrey lane could have looked more hopeless and bedraggled.1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter XIV, in The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:
As a rule he was neat in his person, but now his clothes were in disorder. He looked suddenly bedraggled. I was convinced he had been drinking, and I smiled.1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XXVIII, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC:
Finally delivering “Room on Fire,” the follow-up to their much ballyhooed debut album, the well-heeled but stylishly bedraggled locals try to dispel accusations of one-trick-ponyism.2003, The New Yorker, page 17:

Decaying, decrepit or dilapidated.

She is only coming to gloat over my bedraggled and flowerless borders and to sing the praises of her own detestably over-cultivated garden. I'm sick of being told that it's the envy of the neighbourhood; it's like everything else that belongs to her—her car, her dinner-parties, even her headaches, they are all superlative; no one else ever had anything like them.1919, Saki [pseudonym; Hector Hugh Munro], “The Occasional Garden”, in R[othay] R[eynolds], editor, The Toys of Peace and Other Papers. […], London: John Lane, The Bodley Head […], →OCLC, page 239:
It was a tall, shabby building, that cannot have been painted for years, and it had so bedraggled an air that the houses on each side of it looked neat and clean.1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XI, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC: