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

scraggle

9.6

A rough tangled mass of hair, stems, or plants

noun
/ˈskræɡəl/

: maraña

After weeks of neglect, the hedges turned into a scraggle of tangled branches.

Examples

She attempted to tame the scraggle of hair that tangled around her face.
A low-lying island topped by an anorexic scraggle of stunted pines guarded the entrance.

Fiction book (2000)
The garden was overgrown with a scraggle of weeds and wildflowers.

Synonyms

clump

vsscraggle

39 3.0

A small group of things like plants or soil that grow close together

is looser and more tangled rather than a neat compact group

mat

vsscraggle

8 1.8

A thick mass of things tangled together, like hair or seaweed

is rougher and more uneven rather than tightly interwoven

Antonyms

smooth

256 1.0

A surface that is even and not rough

orderly

55 2.4

Arranged in a tidy, organized way

How Tangled

scraggle

9.6

tangle

13 5.5

cluster

210 3.1

Surface Forms

scraggle singular

scraggles plural

Morphology

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

The form is regular (scrag + -le), but 'scrag' is dialectal/rare and the specific sense 'a tangled mass' is not fully predictable from the base.

Etymology

Scraggle may come from old casual words like scrag ('rough' or 'thin') and sounds like scrawl ('messy writing'), so think of a rough, tangled mass you cannot smooth out.