A lack of elegance as a consequence of wearing threadbare or dirty clothing

Usage examples of shabbiness.

The Shadow, too, had studied Professor Durand and classed his shabbiness as flawless.

Short periods of affluence and then back to seediness and shabbiness once more.

George comes across the water again and makes his way to that curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester Square which is a centre of attraction to indifferent foreign hotels and indifferent foreigners, racket-courts, fightingmen, swordsmen, footguards, old china, gaming-houses, exhibitions, and a large medley of shabbiness and shrinking out of sight.

The theatre over, Mr. George comes across the water again and makes his way to that curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester Square which is a centre of attraction to indifferent foreign hotels and indifferent foreigners, racket-courts, fightingmen, swordsmen, footguards, old china, gaming-houses, exhibitions, and a large medley of shabbiness and shrinking out of sight.

She had long since sold her cheval glass, and her hand mirror had not revealed the shabbiness of her muslin, or that by scraping her silvery clair hair into a severe knot she had made herself look younger than her twenty-three years, not older as she had hoped.

George comes across the water again, and makes his way to that curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester Square, which is a center of attraction to indifferent foreign hotels and indifferent foreigners, racket-courts, fighting-men, swordsmen, footguards, old china, gaming-houses, exhibitions, and a large medley of shabbiness and shrinking out of sight.

The new name for the podars and the nailed-up barns and the shabbiness of the villages and the people.

Laughing children played where by night the mangy, vaguely menacing dogs had restlessly prowled, and the incessant flurry and clamor of business perhaps hid - or at least recolored - the worst of the neighborhood's depressing shabbiness.

Then, with the passing of years, it had gradually acquired a less inimical character, had become, not again a castle of dreams, evoker of fair images and romantic legend, but the shell of a life slowly adjusted to its dwelling: the place one came back to, the place where one had one's duties, one's habits and one's books, the place one would naturally live in till one died: a dull house, an inconvenient house, of which one knew all the defects, the shabbinesses, the discomforts, but to which one was so used that one could hardly, after so long a time, think one's self away from it without suffering a certain loss of identity.