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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
shabby
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
clothes
▪ He was wearing the unobtrusive shabby clothes with soft shoes that would allow him to plod round the streets without being noticed.
▪ The drabness of his surroundings, his own shabby clothes were explained and transformed by these books.
▪ He wore shabby clothes and shoes and a black silk scarf, always, outdoors and in.
room
▪ At the top of the Holiday Inn tower in Des Moines, a shabby room has been brightened with balloons.
▪ Saskia wakes before dawn in her cold, shabby room to imagine herself navigating with Odysseus and marking the constellations.
▪ The old and shabby rooms, flower-filled and soft with candlelight, would ring with voices and laughter.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
shabby hotel rooms
▪ a shabby old man
▪ a shabby suit
▪ John was standing in the doorway in his shabby blue suit.
▪ She wore shabby black clothes, with holes in the elbows of her jacket.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ After this, Tate Britain at Millbank feels cramped, parsimonious and a bit shabby.
▪ At 29 Howard's Avenue the builder's skip was still outside and the rusty scaffolding blinded its shabby windows.
▪ By then, of course, it was totally shabby.
▪ Much to the consternation of the operators, Humphrey's shabby figure would appear and then disappear into high-speed machinery.
▪ Politically, it was essential last summer to distance the government from what had clearly been a shabby episode.
▪ Solid provincial comfort, a little shabby now, but solid.
▪ The villages and towns they passed through were shabby where buildings had long since been left to decay.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Shabby

Shabby \Shab"by\, a. [Compar. Shabbier; superl. Shabbiest.]

  1. Torn or worn to rage; poor; mean; ragged.

    Wearing shabby coats and dirty shirts.
    --Macaulay.

  2. Clothed with ragged, much worn, or soiled garments. ``The dean was so shabby.''
    --Swift.

  3. Mean; paltry; despicable; as, shabby treatment. ``Very shabby fellows.''
    --Clarendon.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
shabby

1660s, of persons, "poorly dressed," with -y (2) + shab "a low fellow" (1630s), literally "scab" (now only dialectal in the literal sense, in reference to a disease of sheep), from Old English sceabb (the native form of the Scandinavian word that yielded Modern English scab; also see sh-). Similar formation in Middle Dutch schabbich, German schäbig "shabby."\n

\nOf clothes, furniture, etc., "of mean appearance, no longer new or fresh" from 1680s; meaning "inferior in quality" is from 1805. Figurative sense "contemptibly mean" is from 1670s. Related: Shabbily; shabbiness. Shabby-genteel "run-down but trying to keep up appearances, retaining in present shabbiness traces of former gentility," first recorded 1754. Related: Shabaroon "disreputable person," c.1700.

Wiktionary
shabby

a. torn or worn; poor; mean; ragged.

WordNet
shabby
  1. adj. showing signs of wear and tear; "a ratty old overcoat"; "shabby furniture"; "an old house with dirty windows and tatty curtains" [syn: moth-eaten, ratty, tatty]

  2. mean and unworthy and despicable; "shabby treatment"

  3. [also: shabbiest, shabbier]

Usage examples of "shabby".

As for Alker, he had only a hat, a shabby brown one, that had stayed on his head during the struggle out front.

His badgeless uniform was shabby, but he seemed clear-eyed and quick to answer, not as if he were someone rightfully grounded.

It was after we had left the shabby little gymnasium and were following Bling back across the campus that an obvious possibility suddenly occurred to me.

Admittedly, it helped that although Thomas Cadge was shabby, he was clean.

With Calamy and Williamson, that makes six of the little beasts, and although I can teach them navigation when things are quiet and beat them whenever they need it, it seems a poor shabby thing to send them out into the world without a notion of history or French or hic haec hoc.

The clachan, through which he presently passed, was sodden, shabby and tumble-down, like a city slum transported to a sour upland.

The place was small, shabby, clean, close to Clea, and even closer to Betty.

He recognised the web-fingered boy from Cradge but not the three shabby monks with him.

Meantime Mr Cupples, in order that he might bear such outward signs of inward grace as would appeal to the perceptions of the Senatus, got a new hat, and changed his shabby tail-coat for a black frock.

Krager asked CabaL, a shabby Dacite brigand of his acquaintance with whom he had frequently gotten drunk.

They were an odd couple, the two of them, and looked shabby, the half-caste, dowdily dressed woman and her tiny daughter, standing nervously in the grand hall with its chandeliers and sweeping staircase and somber portraits of all the Jackson family.

Loveday, her attention suddenly attracted by a tall, thin figure, dressed in shabby black, with a large, dowdyish bonnet, and carrying a basket in her hand as if she were returning from some errand.

But Professor Durand seemed to rely upon his shabby appearance to see him on a route to safety.

Italians, newly enfranchised and smarting about the shabby way in which they had been treated, began to arrive in Rome toward the end of Sextilis.

She considered Eppie, running a revolt from a keyboard in a shabby apartment.