1
[ adjective ] being or dressed in clothes that are worn or torn

Examples

"clothes as ragged as a scarecrow's" "a ragged tramp"

Used in print

(Christopher Davis, First Family....)

It was a Negro section of peeling row_houses , store-front churches and ragged children .

(Frieda Arkin, "The Light of the Sea," in The...)

And the stiffly regal look of them , she saw grimly , lacked the quaver of age which , thwarting the efforts of her amazing will , ran through her spoken_words like a thin ragged string .

(Marvin Schiller, "The Sheep's in the Meadow,"...)

The night after reading her letter about her surgeon uncle - it must have been late in September - I had a vision of myself returned in ragged uniform from The Front , nearly dying , my head bandaged and bloody , and Jessica bending over me , the power of her love bringing me back to life .

Related terms

worn

2
[ adjective ] worn out from stress or strain

Examples

"run ragged"

Used in print

(George Harmon Coxe, Error of Judgement....)

His nerves were getting a_little ragged and his impatience put an edge in his voice .

Related terms

tired

3
[ adjective ] having an irregular outline

Examples

"text set with ragged right margins" "herded the class into a ragged line"

Used in print

(Helen Hooven Santmyer, "There Were Fences"...)

I have no picture in my mind of the garden as_a_whole - that I could not see - but certain aspects of certain corners linger in the memory : wind-blown , frost-bitten , white chrysanthemums beneath a window , with their brittle brown leaves and their sharp scent of November ; ripe pears lying in long grass , to be turned_over by a dusty slippered foot , cautiously , lest bees still worked in the ragged , brown edged holes ; hot colored verbenas in the corner between the dining-room wall and the side porch , where we passed on_our_way to the pump with the half gourd tied to it as a cup by my grandmother for our childish pleasure in drinking from it .

Related terms

uneven

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