scrabbly

scrabbly adjective: characterised by scrabbling, or digging around.

Adjective (1)

scrabbly (comparative more scrabbly, superlative most scrabbly)

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.1961, Today's Education - Volume 50, page 22
- With their carapace they survive the ordeal of the nets, frisking into scrabbly action as soon as they can.1980, John Lehmann, Alan Ross, The London Magazine - Volume 20, Issues 7-12, page 106
Covered in loose rocks or crumbling soil.
- My mount struggled up the last few feet of scrabbly rock.1968, Ronald William Clark, Queen Victoria's Bomb, page 206
- She listened hard while she took the horse there but its hooves plodding across the scrabbly hard clay ground drowned out all other sounds.1995, Raymond Chandler, Robin Chandler, Heartsong: Love/Prairie, →ISBN, page 155
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.1966, Which?, page 196
- The trail from Hannegan Peak down to Hannegan Pass is steep, scrabbly, and not maintained.1982, Fred T. Darvill, Hiking the North Cascades, →ISBN, page 127
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;1907, Oliver Onions, Admiral Eddy, page 136
- I'm not such a very good hand at readin', and this here's such a scrabbly hand.1918, Eliakim Littell, Robert S. Littell, The Living Age - Volume 297, page 402
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...1958, Elizabeth Burgoyne, Gertrude Bell: 1889-1914, page 114
- 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.1990, Paul McCarthy, The twisted mind: madness in Herman Melville's fiction, page 8
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.1965, James McNeish, Fire Under the Ashes: The Life of Danilo Dolci, page 45
- We are having dinner next to a mansion with scrabbly peeling paint and vermilion drapes in the windows.1972, Epoch - Volume 22, page 134
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.2000, E. W. Smith, The Light at the Rim of the World, page 166
- On a scrabbly patch of land outside the shack, oil drums stand on open fires.2005, Kaylie Jones, Speak Now, →ISBN, page 118
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.2006, J. Douglas Bottorff, The Whisper of Pialigos, →ISBN, page 141
- 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.2012, Douglas Wilson, The Templars’ Return: Book One of Touched by Freia, →ISBN, page 73
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.1906, Bertram Mitford, Harley Greenoak's charge, page 254
- Tim traced the voice to a tall, suspendered gentleman in thick glasses with a scrabbly grey-white beard and introduced himself.2010, Dave Bidini, Around the World in 57 1/2 Gigs, →ISBN, page 218
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.1967, Sallie Bingham, The Touching Hand: And Six Short Stories, page 57
- 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.1996, A Sense of History: The Best Writing from the Pages of the American Heritage Dictionary, →ISBN, page 128
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.1925, Fitzhugh Green, Our Naval Heritage, page x
- 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.1936, Elliott Merrick, Ever the Winds Blow, page 129
Having a rough texture; scratchy.
- I 'd hate to feel their scrabbly feet, wouldn't you?1916, Clara Louise Burnham, Instead of the Thorn: A Novel, page 199
- 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.1985, Base Line: A Newsletter of the Map & Geography Roundtable

Adjective (2) capitalized: Scrabbly

Scrabbly (comparative more Scrabbly, superlative most Scrabbly)

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.2012, David Astle, Puzzled: Secrets and clues from a life in words, →ISBN
- The Scrabbliest of the Scrabbly2013, T. Campbell, On Crosswords: Thoughts, Studies, Facts and Snark About a page, →ISBN, page 45

Examples of scrabbly in a sentence

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.1992, G. W. Hawkes, Spies in the Blue Smoke, page 78:
The scrabbly style of running so remarked upon by the press was partly a result of Casey's efforts not to let that happen.1996, Robert W. Creamer, Stengel: His Life and Times, →ISBN, page 164:
They just whisked inside, little paws all scrabbly with excitement,2008, Jacqueline Wilson, The Illustrated Mum, →ISBN, page 73:
We went turtle-hunting and found a lot of scrabbly things that I couldn't bear, but Faith and Ernest like them.2012, Clara Louise Burnham, Jewel's Story Book, →ISBN:

Forms of scrabbly

comparative	more scrabbly
superlative	most scrabbly
comparative	more Scrabbly
superlative	most Scrabbly

Origin of scrabbly

From scrabble + -y.

From Scrabble + -y.

Questions about scrabbly

What does scrabbly mean?: Scrabbly means characterised by scrabbling, or digging around.
How do you use scrabbly in a sentence?: 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.
What part of speech is scrabbly?: Scrabbly is an adjective.

Words near scrabbly in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: scrabbly (page history and authors); Scrabbly (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “scrabbly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/scrabbly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.