scratty hair
- noun
- UK
:
pelo desordenado
- He tried to smooth his scratty hair before the meeting but it wouldn’t stay down.
Examples
-
Children often come home with scratty hair after playing outside all afternoon.
-
After the long hike, her scratty hair made her look wild and windswept.
-
She has scratty hair after waking up.
-
His scratty hair made him look unkempt.
-
After playing in the wind, her scratty hair gave her a wild and carefree look.
-
The child returned home with scratty hair from an afternoon of climbing trees.
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Despite his attempts to comb it, his scratty hair looked messy all day.
Synonyms
23
3.8
Messy and untidy in clothes or appearance
22
3.2
With long, thick, untidy hair, fur, or material that looks rough
13
5.1
Not neat in appearance, often with messy hair or clothes
9
6.0
Thin and untidy in appearance, often with rough, uneven ends
2
3.0
Hair that looks messy because it has not been brushed
1
3.7
Long, thick hair that looks messy and not neat
1
7.7
Dirty and untidy in appearance
Having messy hair after you wake up
Having hair or fabric that is messy and stuck together in clumps
Rough and uneven with many jagged edges
Messy and jumbled so people cannot understand it
Antonyms
How Messy
Surface Forms
Morphology
scratty + hair
The adjective "scratty" is not a productive or transparent morpheme and is unattested in the provided dictionary entry, so its contribution to the phrase is not predictable from constituent meanings. A B1 learner who knows only the literal word "hair" and the (unknown or unclear) form "scratty" would not reliably infer "disheveled/messy hair," making the phrase non-compositional and regionally/lexically opaque.
Etymology
Scratty hair may come from the image of scratty meaning scratched or messed up and hair sticking out, like after a cat has scratched it. So scratty hair means hair that is 'messy' or 'untidy'.