Find the word definition

Crossword clues for run-down

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
run-down
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ He made a fortune buying run-down houses and fixing them up to sell.
▪ I was feeling too run-down to go for my morning jog.
▪ Since the textile company moved out, the area's gotten very run-down.
▪ The men were hiding in an abandoned theater in a run-down part of the city.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ After they had deposited their bags at the hotel, itself ramshackle and run-down, they had gone on to the hospital.
▪ He was wearing a torn and spotted cotton bathrobe and a pair of run-down slippers.
▪ I find a tiny winding street in the Marais that takes me to a shack in the courtyard of a run-down mansion.
▪ Meir Ahronson, wearing a bathrobe and a pair of run-down slippers, opened the door.
▪ Or is the genuine Dublin culture to be found in the new sprawling suburbs with its run-down libraries and shopping malls?
▪ The distant fading signals a run-down age of degenerate belief.
▪ The vehicles will be given to the National Association of Boys' Clubs and will tour run-down inner-city areas.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
run-down

1866, of persons, with reference to health, from verbal phrase, from run (v.) + down (adv.). From 1896 of places; 1894 of clocks. Earliest sense is "oppressed" (1680s).

Wiktionary
run-down

a. 1 (context of a person English) tired and exhausted. 2 (context of a place English) decrepit. 3 (context of a clockwork mechanism English) Having the spring unwound.

WordNet
run-down
  1. adj. worn and broken down by hard use; "a creaky shack"; "a decrepit bus...its seats held together with friction tape"; "a flea-bitten sofa"; "a run-down neighborhood"; "a woebegone old shack" [syn: creaky, decrepit, flea-bitten, woebegone]

  2. having the spring unwound; "a run-down watch"

Usage examples of "run-down".

Dockside were the warehouses and ship outfitters, but above them was a section of town that seemed to consist exclusively of brothels, taverns, druggeries and run-down boarding houses.

After maybe five miles down Westmorland, with Malec thinking they must now be heading for Redbird Mall, where the drive-away occurred, they turned into Kiest Boulevard, and thence through the meaner streets of a run-down neighbourhood.

Prosperous citizens moved out to newer parts of town, leaving the run-down older houses for the workers who provided casual labor around the port and the industrial districts.

Cap drove up the Skeel Gulch Road, past quaint homesteads and run-down barns, freshly mowed hay fields, and a huge pond where a moose grazed on water cabbage.

Sanchez, the ancient widow who was rumored to have murdered her husband in a dust storm sixty-two years before, the Perell twins who -- for unknown reasons -- preferred the old run-down church to the spotless and air-conditioned company chapel on the mining reservation, and the mysterious old man with the radiation-scarred face who knelt in the rearmost pew and never took Communion.

If Warren wanted Chinese food, for example, then the run-down carryout on Ingleside was clearly superior to their old favorite on Route 40.

Marshals Taber and Porter stood posted outside as Fagin and Banish entered the run-down barn shaking off their coats.

The Bella Gata Boutique was in what at first appearance seemed to be a run-down part of the city, but the surrounding shops, though drab on the outside, actually housed rather pricey goods.

Harold Gerber lived in a run-down tenement on Seventh Avenue South, around the corner from Carmine Street.

A few terraces of dilapidated houses, some farms in Radnorshire, a modicum of shares in run-down industries.

The cars looked on a level with the run-down area: an aging Pinto, oversized gas guzzlers that had seen better days, and a new Sentra with a rental sticker.

The dusty and sun-faded jeans, the scuff-toed boots with run-down heels and black marks where the spurs usually rode, the worn-soft chambray workshirt, and the sweat-stained cowboy hat on his head, all were the clothes of a working cowboy.

He'd decided a real estate broker could give him a good run-down on the cast of characters in Cleary - and who might not want a movie made here.

The Daltons had barely started rebuilding the run-down ranch when the trouble began.

And afterwards, in a silent car filled with bitterness and unquenched basic needs, we would mistakenly turn off the main highway and get lost and end up in some no-hope hamlet with a name like Draino, Indiana, or Tapwater, Missouri, and get a room in the only hotel in town, the sort of run-down place where if you wanted to watch TV it meant you had to sit in the lobby and share a cracked leatherette sofa with an old man with big sweat circles under his arms.