scraggy

comparative scraggier · superlative scraggiest

1. Rough and irregular; jagged.

   Her tender arms the angry sharpness rue Of many a scraggy thorn and envious brier;

   c. 1890, William Dean Howells, Tennyson, stanza 18

   1 more example

   [H]e grasped the rock. It was scraggy, and though it tore and bruised him he clung to it.

   1894, Gilbert Parker, chapter 10, in The Trail of The Sword

2. Lean or thin, scrawny.

   He is twenty years younger, but has something of the same spare, scraggy physique.

   1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC

   1 more example

   On one of these occasions, he presented for the first time to Mannering his tall, gaunt, awkward, bony figure, attired in a threadbare suit of black, with a coloured handkerchief, not over clean, about his sinewy, scraggy neck.

   1815 February 24, [Walter Scott], chapter 2, in Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; and Archibald Constable and Co., […], →OCLC