Word.ws English Dictionary

shackly

shackly adjective: shaky, rickety, ramshackle.

Adjective

shackly (comparative more shackly, superlative most shackly)

  1. (UK, US, colloquial, dated) Shaky, rickety, ramshackle.
    • when I got to that old shackly brick store by the Temperance Tavern, I backed up agin the wall to have another think.1876, Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, page 228
  2. (dialectal) Loose-jointed, shambling.

Forms of shackly

comparativemore shackly
superlativemost shackly

Origin of shackly

Probably from dialectal shackle (“to shake, rattle”) + -y.

Questions about shackly

What does shackly mean?
Shackly means shaky, rickety, ramshackle.
What part of speech is shackly?
Shackly is an adjective.

Words near shackly in the dictionary

  1. Shackleys
  2. shacklike
  3. shackling
  4. shacklock
  5. shacklocks
  6. shackly
  7. shacko
  8. shackoes
  9. shackos
  10. shacks
  11. shacks up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shackly (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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