Word.ws English Dictionary

scoury

scoury adjective: showery, marked by intermittent rain showers and wind.

Adjective (1)

scoury

  1. Showery, marked by intermittent rain showers and wind.
    • '... scoury (tempestuous) night.'1900, Henrietta Keddie, Logan's loyalty, by Sarah Tytler, page 211
    • "... scoury night," he said, as he looked up into the dark, portentous sky.1910, One Hundred Choice Selections, page 204

Adjective (2)

scoury

  1. Suffering from scouring (diarrhea).
    • ... scoury calves sometimes die. As with so many livestock disorders, prevention is the name of the game. At one time every calf I brought on the farm caught a wicked brand of scours. Evidently, previously purchased baby bovines had[…]1980, The New Farm
    • ... scoury, weak, drawn up, and unpromising. I still continued to feed the cows heavily because I wanted them to grow the calves well. But I couldn't get the calves to do any good,[…]1916, American Breeder, page 4
  2. Shabby.
    • ... [the] scoury-looking fellow I saw you speaking to at the bridge-end that day of our Sacrament was one of that kind of folk?1876, James Moir Porteous, Brethren in the Keelhowes: Brethrenism Tested by the Word of God, page 171
    • ... scoury coat, ...1977, Harvard University. Library, Harvard Library Bulletin

Origin of scoury

From a dialectal sense of scour, "rain shower", from Old Norse skúr (“shower”), + -y.

From scour (“suffer diarrhea”) + -y.

Questions about scoury

What does scoury mean?
Scoury means showery, marked by intermittent rain showers and wind.
What part of speech is scoury?
Scoury is an adjective.

Words near scoury in the dictionary

  1. scours up
  2. scourse
  3. scoursed
  4. scourses
  5. scoursing
  6. scoury
  7. scouse
  8. Scouse brow
  9. Scouse brows
  10. Scouseness
  11. Scousepop

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: scoury (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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