Muss up, as someone's hair

Usage examples of tousle.

Gerry Brell came into the light wearing a pink quilted robe with big white lapels, her blonde hair tousled, eyes squinting in the light.

She could be at a bonfire night party in an ancient Berber jacket, cutting up parkin and treacle toffee for my friends, pulling charred potatoes out of the fire embers with hair all tousled and nose just the right shade of red from the cold November air one day, and the next she would be in cashmere and pearls, hair in a chignon, taking tea with Lady Horley.

Tousling the same curls with his hand, he delved lower, inserting a probing finger between the pouty folds.

The projectionist adjusted the focus, and the screen filled with a black-and-white picture of a woman with light, tousled hair.

Gould lay in buttonless pajamas on a tousled bed beneath a punkah that had ceased to swing, unshaven, staring at the two intruders with eyes whose pupils were reduced to pin-points, conveying only mirage to the poisoned brain behind.

She used to wonder how the routine rhythms and quotidian readjustments of her new life could hold any interest for PrincePrince, who came home hot and tousled from the hard human action.

Spermwhale, shaking his head sadly as he looked over at the simpering choirboy sitting on the grass, red hair tousled by Harold Bloomguard who still worked frantically massaging his wrists and neck.

Roussillon rushed to the spot, seized the combatants, tousled them playfully, as if they had been children, rubbed their heads together, laughed stormily and so restored the equilibrium of temper.

Ruby, neglected, with a jam-smeared face--the flustered maid, tousled, grubby, her frock gaping--the horrible hall, with its imitation-marble paper and staring linoleum--the prim, trivial, unaired, unused drawing-room, with its pathetic attempts at elegance-- Deb inwardly curled up at the sight of these things as things now belonging to the family.

The imposter sister was not nearly as polished-looking as the anchorwoman, with tousled spikes in her auburn hair and barely a drop of makeup to adorn her catlike eyes.

She washed herself quickly at the pump, ran into the room she shared now with Clea and Betta, and combed her tousled hair.

He glanced at my tousled hair and the smeared fucus and creta of my face, his expression compounded of inquiry, concern and a trace of moralistic disapproval.

Kent Burnett, bearing over his arm a coat newly pressed in the Delmonico restaurant, dodged in at the back door of the saloon, threw the coat down upon the tousled bed, and pushed back his hat with a gesture of relief at an onerous duty well performed.

His sandy disarray of hair looked even more tousled than usual, and he moved spryly for a man in his late thirties.

The rest were tousled looking, and the long aquamarine gown of the other woman--older than Syl by quite a lot--was seared across the train.