haggard

What it means

1. Looking exhausted, worried, or poor in condition

   Pale and haggard faces.

   5 more examples

   A gradual descent into a haggard and feeble state.

   The years of hardship made her look somewhat haggard.

   Staring his eyes, and haggard was his look.

   1685, John Dryden, The Despairing Lover

   Then there was a pale, care-wrinkled woman, not old, but haggard, and already with streaks of gray among her hair, like silver ribbons; one of those women, naturally delicate, whom you at once recognize as worn to death by a brute—probably, a drunken brute—of a husband, and at least nine children.

   1851 April 9, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, a Romance, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, →OCLC

   I looked at the morning / After being up all night / I looked at my haggard face in the bathroom light / I looked out the window / And I saw that ragged soul take flight

   1976, Joni Mitchell, “Black Crow”, in Hejira

   Synonyms: careworn, drawn, raddled, worn-out

2. Wild or untamed

   a haggard or refractory hawk

In a sentence

Pale and haggard faces.

Where it comes from

1. Middle High Germanhag“coppice”
2. Old Frenchfaulcon
3. Middle Frenchhaggard
4. Englishhaggard

From Middle French haggard, from Old French faulcon hagard (“wild falcon”) ( > French hagard (“dazed”)), from Middle High German hag (“coppice”) ( > archaic German Hag (“hedge, grove”)). Akin to Frankish *hagia ( > French haie (“hedge”))