frowsy

comparative frowsier · superlative frowsiest · alternative frowzy

1. Having a dingy, neglected, and scruffy appearance.

   Frowsy girls sat along the curbstones before their baskets.

   1916, James Joyce, chapter III, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, N.Y.: B[enjamin] W. Huebsch, →OCLC

   4 more examples

   And then, ſo nice, and ſo genteel; / Such Cleanlineſs from Head to Heel: / No Humours groſs, or frowzy Steams, / No noiſom Whiffs, or ſweaty Streams, / Before, behind, above, below, / Could from her taintleſs Body flow.

   1731, [Jonathan Swift], “Strephon and Chloe”, in A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed. […], Dublin; London: […] [William Bowyer] for J. Roberts […], published 1734, →OCLC, page 8

   I was terribly afraid, from what I had heard of Blackwater Park, of fatiguing antique chairs, and dismal stained glass, and musty, frowzy hangings, and all the barbarous lumber which people born without a sense of comfort accumulate about them, in defiance of all consideration due to the convenience of their friends.

   1859 November 26 – 1860 August 25, [William] Wilkie Collins, “The Narrative of Marian Halcombe, Taken from Her Diary”, in The Woman in White. […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], published 1860, →OCLC, part I, page 84, column 2

   Having, like Jude, made rather a hasty toilet to catch the train, Arabella looked a little frowsy, and her face was very far from possessing the animation which had characterized it at the bar the night before.

   1894 December – 1895 November, Thomas Hardy, chapter IX, in Jude the Obscure, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], published 1896, →OCLC

   He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it.

   1949 June 8, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter I, in Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC; republished [Australia]: Project Gutenberg of Australia, August 2001