Search for crossword answers and clues

Answer for the clue "Unsteady, as a house ", 7 letters:
rickety

Alternative clues for the word rickety

Word definitions for rickety in dictionaries

Wiktionary Word definitions in Wiktionary
a. 1 Of an object: not strong or sturdy, as because of poor construction or upkeep; not safe or secure; giddy; shaky. 2 Of a person: feeble in the joints; tottering. 3 Affected with or suffering from rickets. alt. 1 Of an object: not strong or sturdy, as ...

WordNet Word definitions in WordNet
adj. inclined to shake as from weakness or defect; "a rickety table"; "a wobbly chair with shaky legs"; "the ladder felt a little wobbly"; "the bridge still stands though one of the arches is wonky" [syn: shaky , wobbly , wonky ]

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary Word definitions in Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"liable to fall down," 1680s, from rickets (with + -y (2)), via notion of "weak, unhealthy." Literal sense is from c.1720 but never common in English. Of material things, from 1799.

Usage examples of rickety.

The only furniture was a rickety angareb covered with coarse sacking in which numerous blood-sucking insects had already set up home.

She knew it from the stiff-backed way Aunty Em climbed down from the rickety wagon and from the way she folded up the hides, with a series of smart snaps, as if they were something rare and precious, to be protected.

Next morning, driven to his hotel by Nat Fraser, Frank found not only his suitcases and the personal things that had been stolen from him by the muggers, but a pile of Swiss francs and Moroccan dirhams atop the rickety dresser.

Presently we glided beneath a rickety footbridge and came to a quarter where the doors of the houses were painted a bright red, and there were a good many moorings with gondoli and even a gilded bissone tied at dock.

He was dancing with a rickety liveliness, his goatish legs and shriveled body giving him the look of an emaciated satyr.

He left the knapsack in the weeds, and secreted one short-fused bomb against a rickety godown, the other behind a hovel.

Carrier and Champlain of New France in the east have their counterparts and contemporaries on the Pacific coast of America in Francis Drake, the English pirate on the coast of California, and in Staduchin and Deshneff and other Cossack plunderers of the North Pacific, whose rickety keels first ploughed a furrow over the trackless sea out from Asia.

And Rune pushed past Will and led him by the faltering light of the knubby candle up a flight of rickety stairs, and eventually to the lodgings of Hugo Rune.

He passed a pair of ragged mumpers, sidestepped an aging doxy, saw the open doorway, and started down the rickety wooden stairs.

February, 1793, when Agnes, with eyes swollen with tears, a market basket on her arm, and a look of dreary despair on her young face, turned that selfsame angle on her way to the Pont Neuf, and nearly fell over the rickety construction which sheltered him and his stock-in-trade.

Oil lamp in hand, Novato began climbing the rickety stairs of the scaffolding.

Crashing through windows with a swift tinkle of glass, then through the uncolored dark of the canopy world, to the rickety craft named Swift Wisdom that would go up one more time but would never be able to come down again, the last two flyers escaped through the pachydermous canopy.

The rickety house shook to a heavy, prideless tread, and through the inner door came Sarah, middle-aged, lop-breasted, hair-tousled, her face lined with care and fat petulance.

Elisha near the guard shack on the same rickety stool as the day before and watched the truck cross the square and stop directly in front of the entrance to the Rabbinical Tunnel.

Corus-cant fell, Sakins looted the capital treasury, taking gems and other valuables dating back thousands of years-a tremendous fortune, and one easily transportable-and departed Vannix on the rickety but very comfortable military corvette that served as his personal transportation.