ramshackle

comparative more ramshackle · superlative most ramshackle

1. In disrepair or disorder; poorly maintained; lacking upkeep, usually of buildings or vehicles.

   They stayed in a ramshackle cabin on the beach.

   5 more examples

   Steady old Curés come jolting past, now and then, in such ramshackle, rusty, musty, clattering coaches as no Englishman would believe in;[…]

   1846, Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy, London: […] Bradbury & Evans, […], →OCLC

   There came […] my lord the cardinal, in his ramshackle coach.

   1854, Arthur Pendennis [pseudonym; William Makepeace Thackeray], The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, volume I, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], →OCLC, page 347

   I called for the cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse.

   1889, Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat […]

   A ramshackle old empire. (of Austria-Hungary).

   1914, David Lloyd George, (Please provide the book title or journal name)

   The villa was a roomy white house, which, as is the case with most continental houses, looked to an English eye frail, ramshackle, and absurdly frivolous, more like a pagoda in a tea-garden than a place where one slept.

   1915, Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, London: Duckworth & Co., […], →OCLC

2. Badly or carelessly organized.

   So ramshackle was the locals' attempt at defence that, with energetic wingers pouring into the space behind panicked full-backs and centre-halves dizzied by England's movement, it was cruel to behold at times.

   2012 September 7, Dominic Fifield, “England start World Cup campaign with five-goal romp against Moldova”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 05 Nov 2022

   1 more example

   The alliance that pushed the Inflation Reduction Act into law in August was always a somewhat fragile and ramshackle one: Green New Dealers and the coal-state senator Joe Manchin, carbon-capture geeks and environmental justice warriors, all herded together in the sort of big-tent play you get with a 50-50 Senate and one party functionally indifferent on climate.

   2022 October 5, David Wallace-Wells, “Progressives Should Rally Around a Clean Energy Construction Boom”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 08 Dec 2022

present singular third person ramshackles · participle present ramshackling · participle past ramshackled · past ramshackled

1. obsoletetransitiveTo ransack.