Then wet umbrellas began to appear, draggled skirts, and mud.

They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank—the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable.

1765, Tobias Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy, Letter 34, Nice, 2 April, 1765,
It was near ten at night, when we entered the auberge in such a draggled and miserable condition, that Mrs. Vanini almost fainted at sight of us, on the supposition that we had met with some terrible disaster, and that the rest of the company were killed.

Wet straw was in his draggled beard; he was so sore and stiff, so bruised and buffeted he could hardly stand or stumble through the shallow water to lie groaning on the shore.

By the late nineteenth century British goshawks were extinct. I have a photograph of the stuffed remains of one of the last birds to be shot; a black-and-white snapshot of a bird from a Scottish estate, draggled, stuffed and glassy-eyed.

Draggled

Meaning

Verb

Adj