The Collaborative International Dictionary
Dowdy \Dow"dy\, a. [Compar. Dowdier; superl. Dowdiest.] [Scot. dawdie slovenly, daw, da sluggard, drab, Prov. E. dowd flat, dead.] Showing a vulgar taste in dress; awkward and slovenly in dress; vulgar-looking. -- Dow"di*ly, adv. -- Dow"di*ness, n.
Wiktionary
adv. In a dowdy manner
WordNet
adv. in a dowdy unfashionable manner; "she dresses dowdily" [syn: frumpily, frumpishly]
Usage examples of "dowdily".
Oleg, his contact, sat opposite him in a dowdily covered chair, a tumbler of malt whisky balanced on its wide arm.
Miss Chadwick wore pince-nez, stooped, was dowdily dressed, amiably vague in speech, and happened to be a brilliant mathematician.
Inside, they found him remonstrating with a dowdily dressed woman who seemed interested in some toilet preparations that he had amassed a stack of in one of the rooms.
They were an odd couple, the two of them, and looked shabby, the half-caste, dowdily dressed woman and her tiny daughter, standing nervously in the grand hall with its chandeliers and sweeping staircase and somber portraits of all the Jackson family.
The dowdily dressed mourners from Faith Tabernacle all stand aside to let her pass, parting before her commanding presence as the waters of the Red Sea did for Moses.
Carrados would have received the impression of a plainly, almost dowdily, dressed young woman of buxom figure.
I remember she was dowdily dressed even for an English girl and then later I understood she was in mourning for her parents who were not long dead of the flu.
A man in a brown rumpled suit and brown hat stood in the hallway, gun in hand, guarding a dowdily attractive woman in her thirties in a blue-and-white-pattern dress, and a boy in a blue-and-red-striped sweater who was maybe twelve.