Crossword clues for shabby
shabby
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Shabby \Shab"by\, a. [Compar. Shabbier; superl. Shabbiest.]
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Torn or worn to rage; poor; mean; ragged.
Wearing shabby coats and dirty shirts.
--Macaulay. Clothed with ragged, much worn, or soiled garments. ``The dean was so shabby.''
--Swift.Mean; paltry; despicable; as, shabby treatment. ``Very shabby fellows.''
--Clarendon.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
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
a. torn or worn; poor; mean; ragged.
WordNet
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]
mean and unworthy and despicable; "shabby treatment"
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.