Hardly polished

Usage examples of ragtag.

They looked a beaten, ragtag unit, but they were still Riflemen and every Baker rifle had an oiled lock and, gripped in its doghead, a sharp-edged flint.

Now, as the mercenaries swept through the Honru city, another ragtag group of humans came forward, surprising him.

Lebanon, the CIA, with all its power and resources, spy satellites, intelligence and infiltration, has never been able to discover where a semiliterate, ragtag band of terrorists was holding them.

Then, rounding the last turn before home, he was stopped by the startling chaos before him that blocked the road and transformed his dull backwater neighborhood into the scene of a natural disaster: there were trucks and cars and monster RVs and a couple of open semitrailers and a ragtag army of intent good-looking people of all ages in baggy shorts and baseball caps, many clutching hand walkie-talkies as if the hard gray rectangles were bricks of precious metal, all moving earnestly among the tables loaded with good-looking food, the folding chairs, the cables, the light stands, with a self-important arrogance, an air of imperviousness, of brute inevitability, because, goddamn it, they were members of a goddamn movie crew.

His was a ragtag horde, with custodians, Unis from farther afield who heeded the call, and a smattering of dwarf clans.

Gilbert tossed his Stetson in the backseat, and the five of us moved toward the gravesite in ragtag fashion.

They've been told for years that the Northern Guard is a ragtag outfit of herders who had to be bailed out by the Lord-Protector.

She supposed these were ragtag hill bandits who waylaid traders and pilgrims, attacked caravans, and raided mountain monasteries and abbeys and the prosperous summer villas overlooking the River Agis.

To be defeated by sorcery was a permissible defeat for a mundane-hard as that admission would be for himbut to be bushwacked by a band of ragtag youths was abysmal incompetence.

To be defeated by sorcery was a permissible defeat for a mundane—hard as that admission would be for himbut to be bushwacked by a band of ragtag youths was abysmal incompetence.

The attacking enemies' ability to fight, their very will to fight, seemed to have simply vanished, and Earth's ragtag defenders were counterattacking everywhere, a complete rout.

Yes, that arrogant young puppy who calls himself 'King' stripped me of my lands and title, disregarding all that I and I alone had done for him and his ragtag army, simply because of a few intemperate words I spoke in a moment of frustrated anger, when I was suffering both illness and injury.

The Invaders from Space (he thought of them that way, with the capital letters) were trying to push the ragtag American force of which he was a part out of Amboy and trap them against the Green River, where there'd be easy prey.

The Invaders from Space (he thought of them that way, with the capital letters) were trying to push the ragtag American force of which he was a part out of Amboy and trap them against the Green River, where there’d be easy prey.

If I wanted the Archon to consider my request a valid one, I had best appear in truth a D'Angeline noblewoman, and not a ragtag refugee in desperate straits.