Word.ws English Dictionary

scabbier

scabbier is the comparative form of scabby.

Meaning of scabby

Adjective

scabby (comparative scabbier, superlative scabbiest)

  1. Affected with scabs; full of scabs.
    • Her wrizled skin, as rough as maple rind,
      So scabby was, that would have loath'd all womankind.1590, Edmund Spenser, “(please specify the book)”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    reef
  2. Diseased with the scab (mange): mangy.
  3. Having a blotched, uneven appearance.
  4. Injured by the attachment of barnacles to the carapace of a shell.
  5. Working against union policies, working to bust unions; in particular, being a scab (worker who crosses a union picket line).
    • The police, the governor, and the "scabby" Hearst Examiner "received a tremendous razzing," according to the Waterfront Worker, while all along the line of march "the workers on the sidelines cheered[…]"1990, Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s, University of Illinois Press, →ISBN, page 166
  6. (Ireland, UK, slang) stingy; scrounging.
    • The chipper was a bit scabby on the vinegar today.

Questions about scabbier

What is scabbier the comparative form of?
Scabbier is the comparative form of scabby.

Words near scabbier in the dictionary

  1. scabbardless
  2. scabbards
  3. scabbed
  4. scabbedness
  5. scabbery
  6. scabbier
  7. scabbiest
  8. scabbily
  9. scabbiness
  10. scabbing
  11. scabbish

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: scabbier (page history and authors); scabby (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: “scabbier.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/scabbier. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.