bedraggled

/bɪˈdræɡəld/

If you're bedraggled, you're dishevelled, limp, and tired. Many people are a bit bedraggled after a very long plane flight.

New parents who spend much of the night awake with a crying baby often look a little bedraggled, and so do travelers and students during finals week. Bedraggled people haven't gotten enough sleep and aren't quite as pulled together and polished as they might like to be. Bedraggled is an 18th-century word, from the now-obsolete verb bedraggle, combining be and draggle, "make wet and dirty" or "lag behind."

Definitions of bedraggled

1. adjective

   limp and soiled as if dragged in the mud
   “the beggar's bedraggled clothes”

   synonyms: draggled

   dirty, soiled, unclean

   soiled or likely to soil with dirt or grime
2. adjective

   in deplorable condition
   “a street of bedraggled tenements”

   synonyms: broken-down, derelict, dilapidated, ramshackle, tatterdemalion, tumble-down

   damaged

   harmed or injured or spoiled