The neighborhood is full of dilapidated houses with scruffy backyards.
dressed in scruffy old clothes to clean out the garage
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The scruffy ambience along Washington did not help the hotel’s appeal or its ability to fill its retail shops.—Andres Viglucci, Miami Herald, 20 Mar. 2026 The new auteurs of the 1990s reflected a broader shift in tone across the culture toward something scruffier and more disillusioned—the cinematic equivalent of Nirvana on the radio and Marc Jacobs’s Perry Ellis grunge collection on the runway.—Maxwell Adler, Vanity Fair, 19 Mar. 2026 Cast your mind back to summer 2019, a pre-Covid era when we were all hooked on Euphoria season one and the high school exploits of protagonist Rue, played by a scruffy Zendaya, all basketball shorts and tangled hair.—Olivia Allen, Vogue, 17 Mar. 2026 Its messiness is also in step with 2020s hyperpop—scruffy, topsy-turvy electronic music that seeks to harness, not counteract, modern overstimulation.—Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 11 Mar. 2026 See All Example Sentences for scruffy
Word History
Etymology
scruff, metathetic variant of scurf (also with senses "something worthless or contemptible, contemptible person") + -y entry 1