draggled

English

Verb

draggled

1. simple past and past participle of draggle

Adjective

draggled (comparative more draggled, superlative most draggled)

1. Soiled and wet as by dragging in the mud.
   • 1857, Charles Dickens, chapter 3, in Little Dorrit‎^[1], Book I:

     Then wet umbrellas began to appear, draggled skirts, and mud.

   • 1865, Lewis Carroll, chapter 3, in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland‎^[2]:

     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.

2. Having a limp, miserable, dilapidated appearance; bedraggled.
   • 1765, Tobias Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy, Letter 34, Nice, 2 April, 1765,^[3]

     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.

   • 1891, Oscar Wilde, chapter VII, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, London, New York, N.Y., Melbourne, Vic.: Ward Lock & Co., →OCLC, page 131:

     Under the portico, with its grey sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of draggled bareheaded girls, waiting for the auction to be over.

   • 1894, [Robert William Chambers], chapter XVII, in In the Quarter, New York, N.Y., Chicago, Ill.: F. Tennyson Neely, publisher, →OCLC, page 313:

     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.

   • 1937, J. R. R. Tolkien, chapter 10, in The Hobbit, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, published 2012:

     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.

   • 2015 January 6, Helen Macdonald, “Costa biography award 2014: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald”, in The Guardian:

     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.

Derived terms

• draggledness
• undraggled