Adjective

(en adjective)

Rough, scruffy, or unkempt.

* 1913 , , John Barleycorn , ch. 31:

The sunburn of my face, what little of it could be seen through a scraggly growth of beard, had faded to a sickly yellow.

* 1980 Nov. 24, John Skow, " In Arizona: A Million Dollar Sale of Cowboy Art," Time :

What he painted was scenes of the Old West, cowboys and Indians, cattle and horses. Pictures scraggly with sagebrush.

Jagged or uneven; scraggy.

* 1916 , , Georgina of the Rainbows , ch. 24:

She would be so happy . . . that she wouldn't notice the spelling or the scraggly writing.

* 2001 Sep. 7, , " At the MTV Awards: Redheads and Circuses," Time :

"I have no idea," the young woman said, checking over the scraggly illegible signature the mystery woman had left her in her autograph book.

Adjective

(er)

In a disorderly state; chaotic; disorderly.

*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-03, volume=408, issue=8847, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Boundary problems , passage=Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory.}}

(of a person) Prone to causing mess.

(of a situation) Difficult or unpleasant to deal with.