scrabbly

adj

1. Characterised by scrabbling, or digging around.

   “Once they were young and little and rather "scrabbly." They were given to loud laughter, to whispers, to scribbling pictures, and to mischievous glances.”

   “With their carapace they survive the ordeal of the nets, frisking into scrabbly action as soon as they can.”

   “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.”

   “The scrabbly style of running so remarked upon by the press was partly a result of Casey's efforts not to let that happen.”

   “They just whisked inside, little paws all scrabbly with excitement,”

2. Covered in loose rocks or crumbling soil.

   “My mount struggled up the last few feet of scrabbly rock.”

   “She listened hard while she took the horse there but its hooves plodding across the scrabbly hard clay ground drowned out all other sounds.”

   “The rock was loose, scrabbly, and I had a hell of a time boring a hole in it.”

   “The hike down is more scrabbly rock and dust courtesy of Pine Creek Pack Trains.”

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.”

   “The trail from Hannegan Peak down to Hannegan Pass is steep, scrabbly, and not maintained.”

   “Loose, scrabbly descent into wash. Enter wash. Loose, scrabbly climb out of wash.”

   “He finds a scrabbly trail, a children's entrance up sheer mud.”

   “A sometimes rough scrabbly route with a lovely finish on grassy southwest-facing slopes.”

4. Scribbly.

   “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;”

   “I'm not such a very good hand at readin', and this here's such a scrabbly hand.”

   “The engraver covered any such portion of a plate with "a series of scratchy, scrabbly lines, laid anyway.”

   “William Steig's wonderfully scrabbly cartoon figures illustrate a book of poems about animals real (including people) and mythical.”

   “The palmist peers at it with a magnifying glass, and analyses the scrabbly lines as if they were a map of buried treasure.”

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...”

   “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.”

   “Or rather to boil down my scrabbly notes to that length.”

6. Of poor quality; poorly maintained.

   “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.”

   “We are having dinner next to a mansion with scrabbly peeling paint and vermilion drapes in the windows.”

   “He wanted to keep shooting till the scrabbly old unpainted building came creaking and crashing down.”

   “He's too good at what he does to spend his time protecting a few scrabbly little diamonds.”

   “Rusty wrought-iron gates and cramped once-painted wooden enclosures bordered and defined scrabbly little plots of Astroturf and overgrown weeds.”

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.”

   “On a scrabbly patch of land outside the shack, oil drums stand on open fires.”

   “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.”

   “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.”

   “It was on the outskirts of town, near scrabbly desert hills.”

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.”

   “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.”

   “In Lubbock, where Sarah lived, there weren't any trees, just tumbleweeds and scrabbly old mesquite bushes.”

   “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.”

   “What little life they could find was scrabbly. Some blades of grass fit enough to survive brought little cheer to the landscape.”

9. Sparse and scraggly.

   “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.”

   “Tim traced the voice to a tall, suspendered gentleman in thick glasses with a scrabbly grey-white beard and introduced himself.”

   “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.”

   “The man on Zeke's side had a scrabbly black beard and wore a dingy baseball cap low over his beady eyes.”

10. Impoverished, hardscrabble

    “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.”

    “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.”

    “He's living west of the river with George Gharboneaux and his sister Marie on that scrabbly little thing George calls a ranch.”

    “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.”

    “My scrabbly practice here is nothing to offer you.”

11. Rough, poor and uncultured.

    “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.”

    “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.”

    “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”

12. Having a rough texture; scratchy.

    “I 'd hate to feel their scrabbly feet, wouldn't you?”

    “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.”

    “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”

    “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.”

    “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.”

13. Characterized by unusual letters (those that have a high score in the game Scrabble).

    “Amy Reynaldo, the Crossword Fiend blogger, labels the richest alphabetical specimens as Scrabbly, an adjective I'm happy to spread.”

    “The Scrabbliest of the Scrabbly”

    “Also, the J in JUST RELAX was convenient in that it was Scrabbly yet off to the side (thus not restricting my options much), though the X in a prime position made the entry a bit of a gamble.”