Ragabash

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

  1. A scruffy, disreputable person dressed in tattered clothes ; having a worn, ragged, untidy look
  2. A vagabond or ragamuffin in shabby garments ; describing something that looks tattered, unkempt and poorly kept
  3. A raggedly dressed, down-at-heel person ; appearing torn, shabby and neglected in dress or condition

Etymology: Before anyone called a scruffy idler a ragabash, English had already turned a demon's name into a word for a ragged, disreputable person. In William Langland's Piers Plowman, written in the late 1300s, "Ragamoffyn" is the name of a devil. By the 1580s ragamuffin meant a ragged, disreputable person; its use for a ragged child came later. Both words grew from the same scrap of cloth, and both bolt an obscure ending onto it. That scrap is "rag", which appears in English around 1300. It most likely came from Old Norse "rǫgg", a tuft of fur or shaggy hair, brought by Scandinavian settlers. It may instead have been worked backward from "ragged", which is recorded at about the same time and originally described rough, shaggy animals before it described torn clothes. Either way, the image at the root is shagginess, and dishevelment has clung to the whole family ever since. By around 1600 ragabash had joined that family. It was first a noun: an idle, ragged, good-for-nothing person, and sometimes a whole crowd of them, the rabble. It also appeared as "ragabrash", a spelling that shows how loosely its tail was attached. The "-abash" ending matches no known word or suffix, and no connection with "bash" or "abash" has been established. It is as unexplained as the second half of ragamuffin, another plain insult lengthened into something more contemptuous. The adjective followed naturally. A ragabash fellow was one who looked the part: unkempt, tattered, beneath notice. Standard English gradually let the word go, but it lived on in Scottish and northern English speech, where a figure in fraying clothes could still be summed up by a word that probably began with a tuft of shaggy hair.

Synonyms: ragamuffin, tatterdemalion, vagabond, rascal, scamp

Antonyms: gentleman, dignitary