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Glite Dictionary
🦴 A thin person ✍️ To write messily 🌱 To grow unevenly 🌿 A tangled mass
scraggle

scraggle

9.9
A thin, ragged person or animal that looks weak
  • noun
  • /ˈskræɡəl/
  • Offensive
translation icon : flacucho
  • The scraggle dog wandered the streets, its ribs visible beneath its thin fur.

Examples

  • Everyone could see that he was a scraggle fellow, often wearing mismatched clothes that hung loosely on him.

  • The scraggle child stood at the edge of the playground, looking lost and out of place among the other kids.

  • Hauser was a lean, scraggle-bearded man, five foot nine or so, with a chaw of tobacco bulging one cheek.

    Fiction book (1994)

Synonyms

stickman
vsscraggle
  • Offensive
1 8.2

A very thin person whose clothes hang loosely

is informal and focuses on scrawniness or a ragged appearance rather than visible bones
scrag
vsscraggle
  • Offensive
9.9

A very thin, bony person

is informal and also suggests a ragged look and can apply to animals
scraplet
vsscraggle
  • Offensive
9.9

A very small weak person used as an insult

is informal and stresses thinness and ragged look rather than small size

Antonyms

plump
44 2.7

A little fat and rounded in a healthy, attractive way

Surface Forms

scraggle singular
scraggles plural

Morphology

scraggle = scrag (semi-transparent) = scrag + le

The sense 'thin, scrawny person' aligns with 'scrag' + '-le', but the base 'scrag' is dialectal/informal so learners may not reliably infer it.

Etymology

Scraggle is related to the word scraggy ('thin' or 'ragged'), so a 'scraggle' is someone or an animal who looks very thin and untidy.