Word.ws English Dictionary

short-legged

short-legged adjective: having short legs, particularly in proportion to one's body.

Adjective

short-legged (comparative more short-legged, superlative most short-legged)

  1. Having short legs, particularly in proportion to one's body.
    • However, small, deep-bodied, shortlegged cattle have been known in Ireland since Celtic times.1995, Marleen Felius, Cattle Breeds: An Encyclopedia
    • The two dogs were beagles, shortlegged and frantic, leaping in and out of the chest-high fall of snow, or plowing their noses through it and furrowing snow up and past their ears, their tails spinning, then looking up with white brows and whiskers, gnomic and hoary-faced as little old men.2010, Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper, page 135

Forms of short-legged

comparativemore short-legged
superlativemost short-legged

Origin of short-legged

From short + legged.

Words formed from short-legged

Questions about short-legged

What does short-legged mean?
Short-legged means having short legs, particularly in proportion to one's body.
What part of speech is short-legged?
Short-legged is an adjective.

Words near short-legged in the dictionary

  1. short-hands
  2. short-haul
  3. short-head seahorse
  4. short-head seahorses
  5. short-horned grasshopper
  6. short-legged
  7. short-leggedness
  8. short-lined chocolate
  9. short-lined chocolates
  10. short-list
  11. short-listed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: short-legged (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: “short-legged.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/short-legged. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.