Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use shabby in a sentence

40 example sentences · adjective, verb

Shabby means of clothing, a place, etc.: unkempt and worn or otherwise in poor condition due to age or neglect; scruffy. Example: “They lived in a tiny apartment, with some old, shabby furniture.”

Examples of shabby by meaning

adjectiveOf clothing, a place, etc.: unkempt and worn or otherwise in poor condition due to age or neglect; scruffy.

  • They lived in a tiny apartment, with some old, shabby furniture.
  • Despite a vast change from crowded slums to tracts of wasteland, due to its grim wartime experience, this approach still provides a shabby and unworthy introduction to the great capital.1951 October, R. S. McNaught, “Lines of Approach”, in The Railway Magazine, London: Tothill Press, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 703

adjectiveOf a person: wearing ragged or very worn, and often dirty, clothing.

  • The fellow arrived looking rather shabby after journeying so far.

adjectivePoor in quality; also, showing little effort or talent.

  • His painting is not too shabby.

verbTo become shabby; to shabbify.

  • You'll be one of those tough, square, solid middle-aged men, like a shabbying brown bear, your golden crew-cut greying judiciously at the temples.1962, Doris Lessing, “The Golden Notebook”, in The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classics), London: Flamingo, HarperCollinsPublishers...

More sentences with shabby

  • It works well enough, but the shabby exterior offends his aesthetic sensibilities.From the entry aesthetic
  • With your shabby attire, you do not present well as a prospective investment banking associate!From the entry present
  • The suspect was a big fat man with a shabby appearance.From the entry big fat
  • This house is shabby: it needs renovating.From the entry renovate
  • Cons: sometimes shabby rather than shabby chic; not much to do in vicinity; minimum stay required.2012, Fodor's, Fodor's England 2013: with the Best of Wales, Fodor's Travel. From the entry shabby chic
  • Philomena passed another line of shabby soldiers waiting patiently at a soup kitchen.2009, Nick Stafford, Armistice, London: Quercus, →ISBN. From the entry armistice
  • It is ironical, however, that they have to accommodate themselves and their children in a shabby hut.2003, Man and Life. From the entry pukka
  • Everything looked gray and shabby, the faces as much as the clothes.1981, Ramsey Campbell, chapter 8, in The Nameless, New York: Tor, published 1985, page 75. From the entry befog
  • Her dress was extremely shabby and her hair disheveled, but her face and figure were extraordinarily beautiful.[1976, Ichisada Miyazaki, “The Provincial Examination and Reexamination”, in Conrad Schirokauer, transl., China's Examination Hell: The…. From the entry jinshi
  • Pride refuses to die in the shabby peajacketed man explaining his panhandling technique.1973, Howard M. Bahr, “The social organization of skid row”, in Skid Row: An Introduction to Disaffiliation, New York, N.Y.; London…. From the entry peajacketed
  • Most Zelda-like, and so is her subsequently futile, shabby career, a series of TV parts.1971 February 15, John Seelye, “The Persistence of the Suffering Woman”, in New York, volume 4, number 7, page 40. From the entry Zelda-like
  • A man in shabby dinner clothes and sleeked-down dandruffy hair came forward, already disapproving.1969, Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City, HarperCollins, published 1993, page 33. From the entry dandruffy
  • He walked across the room to the shabby old cottage piano.1954, Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead, Dorothy, published 2010, page 8. From the entry cottage piano
  • In front of each hung a shabby bit of rombowline, dating from antiquity.1929, Viola Irene Cooper, Windjamming to Fiji, New York: A. L. Burt Company, →OCLC, page 114. From the entry rombowline
  • He was a Viking in shabby tweeds, inaureoled in his hair.1920, Storm Jameson, The Happy Highways, New York: Century, Book 2, Chapter 5, p. 157. From the entry inaureole
  • He showered brandy-snaps on the children, and bought a polka-jacket for a shabby old woman.1917, Henry Handel Richardson, Australia Felix, Part I/Chapter I. From the entry polka jacket
  • After some further toil his efforts were rewarded, and a very shabby door-mat lay exposed to view.1908, Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows. From the entry toil
  • Its "shabby aesthetic and narrative shortcomings are outweighed by its more drastically questionable moral ones," says the Guardian.2018 June 16, Peter Kafka, “MoviePass Invested in ‘Gotti,’ the New John Travolta Mob Movie Everyone Hates”, in Vox, archived from the…. From the entry tl;dr
  • In fact, the shabbier and shadier the operation, the less blunt Martin can expect.” Queenie and Hellen exchanged glances.2011, Barbara Metzger, Queen of Diamonds. From the entry gemsmith
  • They both know the shabbiest, shadiest fence of all.2011, Barbara Metzger, Queen of Diamonds. From the entry gemsmith
  • Can the rumpled elegance and mismatched opulence of shabby chic find happiness with cutting edge digital tools and techniques?2011, Jeanne Wines-Reed, Joan Wines, Digital Scrapbooking For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 72. From the entry shabby chic
  • Foxley describes as a fashionably shabby, slipcovered sort of way.2009 July 9, Joyce Wadler, “Summer House Horrors: On a Private Lake in Maine, No One Can Hear You Scream”, in New York Times. From the entry slipcovered
  • That is why, in spite of shabby dresses, unbanged hair, tremendous mouths, and large noses, some persons are purely delightful.2007, Annie H. Ryder, Hold Up Your Heads, Girls!, page 13. From the entry unbanged
  • If some shabby looking “dero” turns up at the gate no need to call the cops, its me.2001 August 11, warfer69, “I bought the 60 warfer”, in rec.models.rc.helicopter (Usenet). From the entry dero
  • Iris went away to boil water or something, and Claire had time to investigate the shabby finery of the room.1990, Mary Ann Kelly, chapter 11, in Park Lane South, Queens (A Thomas Dunne Book), New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, →ISBN, page 177. From the entry Havishamesque
  • Penny whist, the game of shabby genteel dowagers and doddards.1984, Elizabeth Hewitt, Captain Black, New York, N.Y.: Signet, New American Library, →ISBN, page 57. From the entry doddard
  • He sat on a bollard, looking out across the water, a man more small and shabby than expected.1965, Poul Anderson, The Star Fox. From the entry bollard
  • He stood there beside the gaunt rabbit of a mule, the two of them shabby and motionless and unimpatient.1929, William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury. From the entry unimpatient
  • The first truly gripping moment of the series occurred at a fire-pit recoupling, when Hugo berated Toby for his shabby treatment of Chloe.2021 August 1, Barbara Ellen, “The week in TV: Sexy Beasts; Love Is Blind: After the Altar; Professor T; India's Rape Scandal”, in The…. From the entry bro code
  • All the shabby railway buildings in front of the station concourse have either been removed or transformed into a shopping complex and swish homes.2020 June 3, Howard Johnston, “Regional News: Cambridge”, in Rail, page 23. From the entry swish
  • Lydia and the boys lived in a shabby, prefabricated house of three rooms, which had been set down in the shade of an ironwood.1987, Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, Vintage, published 1998, page 139. From the entry ironwood
  • The lower half of a duplex apartment on a shabby Montreal street, dark as limbo, jerry-built fifty years ago and going off keel ever since.1960, Brian Moore, chapter 1, in The Luck of Ginger Coffey, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., page 4. From the entry off keel
  • He was clad in a shabby khaki-drill suit and grubby panama and sandshoes, and wore neither socks nor shirt, and was unshaven.1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter III, in Capricornia, page 36. From the entry sandshoe
  • He had said he would, but had dawdled skillfully and was still unfitly in bare feet and the shabby garments of a weekday.1921, Harry Leon Wilson, The Wrong Twin. From the entry unfitly
  • The volumes were mostly shabby and bruised; they had evidently been picked up one by one in the humble mangers of the second-hand vendor.1919, Christopher Morley, “(please specify the page)”, in The Haunted Bookshop, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, →OCLC. From the entry browse

Meaning of shabby

  1. adjective Of clothing, a place, etc.: unkempt and worn or otherwise in poor condition due to age or neglect; scruffy.
  2. adjective Of a person: wearing ragged or very worn, and often dirty, clothing.
  3. adjective Of a person, their behaviour, etc.: despicable, mean; also, not generous; stingy, tight-fisted.

Full definition of shabby

Questions about shabby in a sentence

How do you use shabby in a sentence?
Shabby is used as an adjective and verb. For example: “They lived in a tiny apartment, with some old, shabby furniture.”
What is a short sentence with shabby?
“His painting is not too shabby.”
What does shabby mean?
Shabby means of clothing, a place, etc.: unkempt and worn or otherwise in poor condition due to age or neglect; scruffy.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shabby (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use shabby in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/shabby. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.