Dictionary

scrabbly en · ADJ

Etymology

From scrabble + -y.

Meanings

1. Characterised by scrabbling, or digging around.
   • As it was, though, I had to smile and pretend to enjoy the feeling of scrabbly little legs in my mouth, or the whimpers of something that didn't enjoy being chewed. 2013, Tad Williams, Happy Hour in Hell: Bobby Dollar 2, →ISBN:
   • We went turtle-hunting and found a lot of scrabbly things that I couldn't bear, but Faith and Ernest like them. 2012, Clara Louise Burnham, Jewel's Story Book, →ISBN:
   • They just whisked inside, little paws all scrabbly with excitement, 2008, Jacqueline Wilson, The Illustrated Mum, →ISBN, page 73:
   • With their carapace they survive the ordeal of the nets, frisking into scrabbly action as soon as they can. 1980, John Lehmann, Alan Ross, The London Magazine - Volume 20, Issues 7-12, page 106:
   • Once they were young and little and rather "scrabbly." They were given to loud laughter, to whispers, to scribbling pictures, and to mischievous glances. 1961, Today's Education - Volume 50, page 22:
   • The scrabbly style of running so remarked upon by the press was partly a result of Casey's efforts not to let that happen. 1996, Robert W. Creamer, Stengel: His Life and Times, →ISBN, page 164:
   • He saw another form with three legs; some with long tails and scrabbly long fingers on shortened arms; others with skulls that were half human/half reptilian. 2012, N.T. Bergeron, Conspiracy: Earth, →ISBN:
   • That night under the porch there was a scrabbly sound, like a dog in a gravel pile, going steadily on under barks and groans and screeches. Something was digging down deeper. 1992, G. W. Hawkes, Spies in the Blue Smoke, page 78:
2. Covered in loose rocks or crumbling soil.
   • The hike down is more scrabbly rock and dust courtesy of Pine Creek Pack Trains. 2011, Laurence Brauer, A Summer in the High Sierra, →ISBN:
   • The rock was loose, scrabbly, and I had a hell of a time boring a hole in it. 1998, G. W. Hawkes, Surveyor, page 105:
   • My mount struggled up the last few feet of scrabbly rock. 1968, Ronald William Clark, Queen Victoria's Bomb, page 206:
   • She listened hard while she took the horse there but its hooves plodding across the scrabbly hard clay ground drowned out all other sounds. 1995, Raymond Chandler, Robin Chandler, Heartsong: Love/Prairie, →ISBN, page 155:
3. Difficult to negotiate; requiring scrambling.
   • The button was a bit awkward for some people's thumbs - big, beefy thumbs found it on the small side, while long, elegant nails found it rather scrabbly. 1966, Which?, page 196:
   • He finds a scrabbly trail, a children's entrance up sheer mud. 2012, Margaret Atwood, Dancing Girls and Other Stories, →ISBN, page 91:
   • The trail from Hannegan Peak down to Hannegan Pass is steep, scrabbly, and not maintained. 1982, Fred T. Darvill, Hiking the North Cascades, →ISBN, page 127:
   • A sometimes rough scrabbly route with a lovely finish on grassy southwest-facing slopes. 2015, Gillean Daffern, Gillean Daffern's Kananaskis Country Trail Guide, →ISBN, page 85:
   • Loose, scrabbly descent into wash. Enter wash. Loose, scrabbly climb out of wash. 2006, Peter Massey, Jeanne Wilson, Backcountry Adventures Arizona, →ISBN, page 157:
4. Scribbly.
   • William Steig's wonderfully scrabbly cartoon figures illustrate a book of poems about animals real (including people) and mythical. 1988, Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books - Volume 42, page 54:
   • Bundles of letters written on blue or lilac notepaper in scrabbly foreign writing were stuffed into Mr. Early's desk and the dresser drawer in the kitchen; 2012, Stella Gibbons, The Rich House, →ISBN, page 87:
   • The engraver covered any such portion of a plate with "a series of scratchy, scrabbly lines, laid anyway. 1985, Cartographica - Volume 22, page 81:
   • I read down through her scrabbly writing and all her fancy phrases. 2011, Emily Diamand, Raiders' Ransom - Volume 1, →ISBN, page 85:
   • The lines of the devices were very scrabbly, and the blue was muddy, and the red was a streaky pink, and Eddy looked very doubtfully at them; 1907, Oliver Onions, Admiral Eddy, page 136:
   • The palmist peers at it with a magnifying glass, and analyses the scrabbly lines as if they were a map of buried treasure. 2005, Vikas Swarup, Q and A, page 83:
   • I'm not such a very good hand at readin', and this here's such a scrabbly hand. 1918, Eliakim Littell, Robert S. Littell, The Living Age - Volume 297, page 402:
5. Thrown together; disorganized or slapdash.
   • After a rather scrabbly lunch, eaten with all the children sprawling over the table — they are brick red in colour and have tight rings of black hair and beady eyes — I walked out with my host and hostess in the rain... 1958, Elizabeth Burgoyne, Gertrude Bell: 1889-1914, page 114:
   • Or rather to boil down my scrabbly notes to that length. 2006, William Empson, John Haffenden, Selected letters of William Empson, page 52:
   • He had to learn to climb a ship's rigging; spend many hours aloft, sometimes in bad weather; scrub decks; risk his life chasing whales; eat scrabbly food; sleep in a dank, crowded forecastle. 1990, Paul McCarthy, The twisted mind: madness in Herman Melville's fiction, page 8:
6. Of poor quality; poorly maintained.
   • He's too good at what he does to spend his time protecting a few scrabbly little diamonds. 2012, Paula Rae Wallace, Radiance: A Mallory O'shaughnessy Novel, →ISBN, page 39:
   • Rusty wrought-iron gates and cramped once-painted wooden enclosures bordered and defined scrabbly little plots of Astroturf and overgrown weeds. 2014, Denise Chávez, The King and Queen of Comezón, →ISBN, page 276:
   • He wanted to keep shooting till the scrabbly old unpainted building came creaking and crashing down. 2010, George Bowering, Caprice, →ISBN:
   • We are having dinner next to a mansion with scrabbly peeling paint and vermilion drapes in the windows. 1972, Epoch - Volume 22, page 134:
   • He remembered it well — the scrabbly coloured boats, drawn on to the shingle, painted and chipped with religious legends, the big kerosene lamps, the black nets. 1965, James McNeish, Fire Under the Ashes: The Life of Danilo Dolci, page 45:
7. Characterized by sparse, stunted vegetation, infertile.
   • The warm climate must make those qualities grow as abundantly as the vegetation — and all from a scrabbly soil. 2000, E. W. Smith, The Light at the Rim of the World, page 166:
   • One morning in early May the following year, two months before J.D. Miller fell out of the green rowboat and drowned, Jack and Marjorie found themselves together once more in the scrabbly country behind the village of Merrick Bay. 2011, Gregor Robinson, Providence Island, page 193:
   • On a scrabbly patch of land outside the shack, oil drums stand on open fires. 2005, Kaylie Jones, Speak Now, →ISBN, page 118:
   • It was on the outskirts of town, near scrabbly desert hills. 2015, Elaine Dimopoulos, Material Girls, →ISBN, page 148:
   • Hiking out there these days on the scrabbly bluffside, I can easily pick out the conical mounds; the center of each has been dug into and gouged out by a looter or curiosity seeker, probably before the 1920s. 2006, Laurie Hovell McMillin, Buried Indians: Digging Up the Past in a Midwestern Town, page 53 0299216845:
8. Stunted.
   • We followed a well-worn trail that led across windswept slopes, punctuated with scrabbly vegetation and weathered boulders and dotted with occasional stone-and-mud huts with thatched roofs. 2006, J. Douglas Bottorff, The Whisper of Pialigos, →ISBN, page 141:
   • His feet dragged through the small, scrabbly bushes that dotted the stretch of land sloping up from Jesik's house, each impact sparking a fresh explosion of seed-pods, sticks, and insects. 2012, Douglas Wilson, The Templars’ Return: Book One of Touched by Freia, →ISBN, page 73:
   • After a few minutes they reached a path into the forest, a mixture of gum trees and other scrabbly ones, with funny pointed cones that poked out at odd angles. 2014, Graham Wilson, Just Visiting, →ISBN:
   • In Lubbock, where Sarah lived, there weren't any trees, just tumbleweeds and scrabbly old mesquite bushes. 2013, Tracy Daugherty, Late in the Standoff: Stories and a Novella, →ISBN:
   • What little life they could find was scrabbly. Some blades of grass fit enough to survive brought little cheer to the landscape. 2014, Dr. Bentwick Pestbog, The Apocalypse for Dipshits, →ISBN, page 126:
9. Sparse and scraggly.
   • Tim traced the voice to a tall, suspendered gentleman in thick glasses with a scrabbly grey-white beard and introduced himself. 2010, Dave Bidini, Around the World in 57 1/2 Gigs, →ISBN, page 218:
   • It's just a china head and a rubber body with the arms gone. The hair is all scrabbly. It's ugly, and nobody's allowed to have private stuff, but when Sister Scary tried to take it away, Isma screamed so much you could hear it all over the school, and everybody thought their ears were going to fall off. 2010, Mary Doria Russell, A Thread Of Grace, →ISBN, page 324:
   • The man on Zeke's side had a scrabbly black beard and wore a dingy baseball cap low over his beady eyes. 2013, C. C. Marks, Heart of Mercy:
   • Seen in the darkness, it was that of an evil-looking, thick-set savage, with a forbidding countenance dotted unevenly with scrabbly wisps of beard. 1906, Bertram Mitford, Harley Greenoak's charge, page 254:
10. Impoverished, hardscrabble
    • The rest came up with the rednecks, newcomers themselves who had never before ventured any farther from their scrabbly little farms and flyblown hamlets than it took to do business with the local moonshiner, and couldn't get used to the idea that Jim Crow didn't travel. 2012, Loren D. Estleman, Jitterbug, →ISBN:
    • And there was the whole valley spread out down below us, the brown river looking blue and the fields that were so rusty-poor, close up, a fine green from that distance, and even our house with its scrabbly yard looking like a pretty little farm. 1967, Sallie Bingham, The Touching Hand: And Six Short Stories, page 57:
    • He's living west of the river with George Gharboneaux and his sister Marie on that scrabbly little thing George calls a ranch. 2004, Floyd Travis, Jerry Travis, Prairie View, →ISBN, page 21:
    • We turned onto a gravel road to a place called Honeywell, a heap of run-down houses, bird dogs and beagle hounds staked and chained in scrabbly yards, rows of mailboxes nailed to posts along the road, a lot of them with their lids hanging open. 2005, Lee Martin, The Bright Forever: A Novel, →ISBN:
    • My scrabbly practice here is nothing to offer you. 2008, Judith Musser, "Tell it to Us Easy" and Other Stories, →ISBN, page 293:
    • He had lost an arm serving with Nelson at Trafalgar, and after the great three-deckers he was used to, the scrabbly little collection of craft on Lake Erie must have seemed very modest to him. 1996, A Sense of History: The Best Writing from the Pages of the American Heritage Dictionary, →ISBN, page 128:
11. Rough, poor and uncultured.
    • It was such a blessing that there were other beings beside hard, scrabbly, warring men, people who need not be afraid to be soft, women with pretty eyes. 1936, Elliott Merrick, Ever the Winds Blow, page 129:
    • His shirt was fine broadcloth with detachable collar, and all these things were almost unheard of in this land of bearded renegades, horse ranchers, scrabbly whiskey smugglers, hillside farmers and halfbreed Indians whose once-proud 1968, Eric Allen, The Hanging at Whiskey Smith and Marshal From Whiskey Smith:
    • The modern mariner who fells his shipmate with a blow of the fist is vastly more interesting a study when he is theoretically one of the highest products of our vaunted civilization than when he is just a scrabbly deck-hand under Drake. 1925, Fitzhugh Green, Our Naval Heritage, page x:
12. Having a rough texture; scratchy.
    • The sand that a moment ago felt almost soft as you rubbed it between your fingers now feels rough and scrabbly and scratchy against your belly. 1995, Bernice B. Johnston, Real-world Customer Service, →ISBN, page 30:
    • I 'd hate to feel their scrabbly feet, wouldn't you? 1916, Clara Louise Burnham, Instead of the Thorn: A Novel, page 199:
    • Thorn shook his head, crouching himself low to the stone, fingertips caressing its scrabbly surface as if it were the most delicate piece of rice parchment 1995, George Lucas, Shadow Moon, page 431:
    • Actually, I know little of corn, except for the liquid variety... but I do know that the hard, ugly, scrabbly stuff in the center is the cob ~ and without that, we don't have the pretty stuff on the surface -- and that's what this award is all about. 1985, Base Line: A Newsletter of the Map & Geography Roundtable:
    • Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird's dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once. 2011, Lila Azam Zanganeh, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, →ISBN:
    • I stepped quickly to him and my passage was buoyed by panic, but as I drew near, I heard an upsurge of scrabbly, heavy breathing, and his mouth closed and opened and closed and then opened and stayed open as the sound of his stupor receded for a time. 2014, Robert Olen Butler, The Hot Country, →ISBN:

Forms