drabble-tail
drabble-tail noun: a draggle-tail; a prostitute or promiscuous woman.
Noun
drabble-tail (plural drabble-tails)
- A draggle-tail; a prostitute or promiscuous woman.
- Whose tinsel robes of tawdry language trail, Slatterns in fine attire, a drabble tail; Whose monft'rous thoughts, diminutive and vile, Seem pigmy pages to a giant style;1785, The Beauties of the Brinsleiad, page 22
- If the rubber piled up to the ceiling she would simply move to another room. His disgust with such slatternly, drabbletail customs of India rose to the surface as he slapped twenty-rupees in the crack-salesman's light-colored palm. The girl winked at the pimp as he slipped out to the hallway.1979, Dale Riepe, The Owl Flies by Day, page 40
- An untidy person; a general term of contempt.
- Jinx said to Bubber [a male character]– "Aw go 'haid, drabble[-]tail. Ain' nobody studyin' yo' family."1994, Rudolph Fisher, The Walls of Jericho, page 14
- the drunken drabbletail Dublin drab2002, Seamus Deane, Angela Bourke, Andrew Carpenter, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing - Volume 5, page 1607
- A mess; something bedraggled or cheaply made.
- Ngarara went in, and mistaking the post for Ruru, encircled it with the drabbletail of her dress.1876, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, page 117
- Probably she got it on hire from some cheap costume dealer in the Brunnen Strasse or some such locality. It was a perfect drabbletail, and looked hideous.1886, Julius Stinde, The Buchholz Family: Sketches of Berlin Life - Volume 1, page 86
Adjective
drabble-tail
- Ragtag.
- What was ailing this ordinarily competent musical flock that they should have languished into such a straggly, drabbletail gathering of barnyard fowl?1993, Nancy Kay Webb, “Community Concert”, in Ridge Review, volume 10, page 42
- Most of the inhabitants were white women, noted Tom Osborn, with lots of dirty, half-naked children hanging onto their skirts. When Osborn asked a drabbletail group gathered in front of a stick-chimney shanty to account for their husbands, two or three acknowledged the men were away soldiering...1999, Michael Golay, A Ruined Land: The End of the Civil War, page 101
Examples of drabble-tail in a sentence
- Lad-loupin molls an gadabouts, / fellow-fond an sly, / flappy-skets an drabble-tails / oo'll bleed a bloke bone-dry: […]1985 July, Blake Morrison, “The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper”, in London Review of Books, volume 7, number 12:
- No Latin prayers or laughing drabble-tail whores.1998, Mark Anthony Jarman, “Skin a Flea for Hide and Tallow”, in 19 Knives, published 2008, page 71:
- A couple of hundred papist drabble-tails, found begging for quarter with whorish mouths, are heaped by some wagons, where his men eye them hungrily.2014, Antonia Senior, Treason's Daughter:
- "That's as well, you low-arsed pair o' drabble-tails.2016, Julian Stockwin, chapter 2, in The Powder of Death:
Synonyms of drabble-tail
Forms of drabble-tail
| plural | drabble-tails |
|---|
Origin of drabble-tail
From drabble (“to make wet and dirty by dragging through the mud”) + tail.
Questions about drabble-tail
- What does drabble-tail mean?
- Drabble-tail means a draggle-tail; a prostitute or promiscuous woman.
- How do you use drabble-tail in a sentence?
- Lad-loupin molls an gadabouts, / fellow-fond an sly, / flappy-skets an drabble-tails / oo'll bleed a bloke bone-dry: […]
- What part of speech is drabble-tail?
- Drabble-tail can be a noun or an adjective.
- What is the plural of drabble-tail?
- The plural of drabble-tail is drabble-tails.
Words near drabble-tail in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: drabble-tail (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “drabble-tail.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/drabble-tail. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.