frousy

English

Adjective

frousy (comparative frousier, superlative frousiest)

1. Alternative form of frowsy
   • 1843 December 19, Charles Dickens, “Stave Four. The Last of the Spirits.”, in A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, London: Chapman & Hall, […], →OCLC, page 129:

     Sitting in among the wares he dealt in, by a charcoal-stove, made of old bricks, was a gray-haired rascal, nearly seventy years of age; who had screened himself from the cold air without, by a frousy curtaining of miscellaneous tatters, hung, upon a line; and smoked his pipe in all the luxury of calm retirement.

   • 1892, J[ames] Macdonald Oxley, Bert Lloyd's Boyhood: A Story From Nova Scotia, London: Hodder and Stoughton, page 350:

     With him they went the rounds of squalid tenements, hideous back alleys, and repulsive shanties, the tattered children gazing at them with faces in which curiosity was mingled with aversion, and their frousy parents giving them looks of enmity and mistrust, no doubt because they were so clean and well dressed.

   • 1909, Ingraham Lovell [pseudonym; Josephine Daskam Bacon], Margarita's Soul: The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty, New York, N.Y., London: John Lane Company; The Bodley Head, page 14:

     Fate stood by that news-stall, with the blear-eyed, frousy woman that tended it looking vacantly on; Fate, veiled, too, and not even monosyllabic in his behalf.

References

• “frousy”, in Collins English Dictionary.
• “frowzy, adj.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.