What is "ramshackle"

Usage examples of "ramshackle".

Once upon a time there was a destitute widow who lived in a ramshackle house with her two children named Snow White and Rose Red for the flowers that bloomed on the rosebushes in the yard, the flowers that bloomed, the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la.

What the day before it had taken him three hours to make from striped pants, a jacketlike rag with bold checks, a brimless hat, and, with the help of an incomplete and ramshackle ladder, an armful of freshly cut willow switches, he tore down the following morning, to construct from the same materials an oddity of a very different race and faith, but which like its predecessor commanded birds to keep their distance.

I was doing some investigation on the loneliest part of the prairies, at a ramshackled house which had broken the heart of homesteaders, who had abandoned it.

Bryson pulled up in front of his house, a ramshackle Queen Anne-style dwelling with a mansard roof and plaster facade.

Mansion closed softly, and Paraster Montheir found himself listening to a high wail of pain coming from somewhere within that old, ramshackle, fortresslike house.

Conjure Woman had lived in a ramshackle cabin on what had once been Parsell land for as long as anyone could remember.

Our rentable property is three ramshackle cabins on the alley at the rear of the lot, for which we get four dollars a month each, when we can collect it.

There the villains disembarked with their mysterious freight at a ramshackle place called Castle Tenebrose that overlooks the sea.

Waiting only for some turn of events that would break the grip of the ramshackle systems that suppressed them, Balts, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks, Albanians, Bulgars, Romanians, Kurds, Arabs, Armenians, and a host of other nationalities looked forward eagerly to their day of liberation.

She would arise early and go for a swim--their bungalow was just up the bluff from one of the most beautiful, bluest, and most isolated beaches they had ever seen--and then she would ride her horse into the tiny collection of ramshackle huts that passed for a village here.

Winding alleys and narrow streets separated the ramshackle hovels from dingy courts bearing deceptively exotic names like Caribee Islands and the Bermudas.

Not even a Congar or a Coplin, Two River folk notorious for laziness among other things, would keep a place as run down and ramshackle as these rough stone houses, walls slanting as if about to topple over on the chickens scratching in the dirt.

But the chairman of the railway company had courageously crossed the mountains in a ramshackle diligencia, mainly for the purpose of meeting his engineer-in-chief engaged in the final survey of the road.

As soon as they settled on old chairs and ramshackle furniture Whip introduced them to the commander of Garbutt Field.

Uhl and Smiddy walked slowly across the grubby lawn and climbed three steps to the ramshackle veranda.