What is "frowsy"

Usage examples of "frowsy".

Sondra was at least somewhat better off in a frowsy black coverall, but it definitely looked like it had been slept in, with a few crumbs from breakfast on the lapel.

Template Windbag sat back in his frowsy old armchair and blinked a time or two.

Kitty Oppenheimer had a flat, pretty face, a frowsy dress and dark, thick hair.

My frowsy friend produced from some interior of his frayed clothing half a loaf of bread, pepper, and salt.

The frowsy woman who sat at the desk in the lobby of the great Friederichsbad and sold bath tickets, not only insulted me twice every day, with rigid fidelity to her great trust, but she took trouble enough to cheat me out of a shilling, one day, to have fairly entitled her to ten.

What was once a smooth-shaven lawn before the house, dotted here and there with ornamental shrubs, was now covered with frowsy tangled grass, with horseposts set up, here and there, in it, where the turf was stamped away, and the ground littered with broken pails, cobs of corn, and other slovenly remains.

With frowsy hair, skirts askew and red hands, she talked loud while washing the floor with great swishes of water.

One afternoon, while Hamid-Jones was letting himself through the parlor on his way upstairs to the bridge to his quarters, he overheard a conversation Roxane was having with her frowsy neighbor, a neo-Nestorian woman whose husband was a tile worker.

Women in frowsy dresses ran bakeshops, trundled basketloads of fish and flowers, plied meat cleavers against stained butchers' blocks in grimy little storefronts whose back rooms often hid the misery and desperation of illegal abortions.

Next ask that dumpled hag, stood snuffling by, With her three frowsy blowsy brats o’ babes, The scum o’ the kennel, cream o’ the filth-heap - Faugh!

She led him further down the street, in the direction the girl had fled, then opened a door sandwiched in between a boarded-up storefront that had once sold groceries and what looked like a combination self-service laundrey and betting parlor, judging by the number of frowsy, bitter-faced women playing cards and the even greater number of men rolling dice while the machines jigged and bumped and rattled their syncopated rhythm, cleaning what few clothes these people owned.

There was something terribly stuffy about Canada in my boyhood -- a want of daring and great dimension, a second-handedness in cultural matters, a frowsy old-woman quality -- that got on his nerves.

And cases and cases of coins, and snuffboxes, and combs, and mirrors that won't reflect any more, and clothes that look as if the wearers had all been midgets, and masses of frowsy tat that tells us nothing at all.

I think they were worse than those in the vaude houses I had known, because those at least were in constant use and had a frowsy life to them.