bedraggled

English

WOTD – 22 February 2017

A Himalayan cat looking bedraggled (sense 1) after being bathed

bedraggled (comparative more bedraggled, superlative most bedraggled)

Wet and limp; unkempt.
- 1851, Herman Melville, “The Chase.—Third Day.”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, publishers; London: Richard Bentley, OCLC 30847311; republished as Moby Dick or The White Whale (Famous Sea Stories), Boston, Mass.: The St. Botolph Society, 53 Beacon Street, 1892 (8th printing, February 1922), OCLC 237074, page 527:
  A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea.
Decaying, decrepit or dilapidated.
- 1919, H[ector] H[ugh] Munro (Saki), “The Occasional Garden”, in The Toys of Peace and Other Papers, London: John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York, N.Y.: John Lane Company, OCLC 364610, page 239:
  She is only coming to gloat over my bedraggled and flowerless borders and to sing the praises of her own detestably over-cultivated garden. I'm sick of being told that it's the envy of the neighbourhood; it's like everything else that belongs to her—her car, her dinner-parties, even her headaches, they are all superlative; no one else ever had anything like them.

unkempt

bedraggled

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