slatternly

slatternly, dowdy, frowzy, blowsy can all mean deficient in neatness, freshness, or smartness, especially in dress or appearance.

Slatternly stresses notions of slovenliness, unkemptness, and sordidness

{

a small, slatternly looking craft, her hull and spars a dingy black, rigging all slack and bleached nearly white, and everything denoting an ill state of affairs aboard— Melville

}

{

lived with them, in the slatternly apartment among the unwashed dishes in the sink and on the table, the odor of stale tobacco smoke, the dirty shirts and underwear piled in corners— Warren

}

Dowdy is likely to imply a complete lack of taste typically marked by a blend of something untidy, drab, or tawdry

{

her shoes were bought a long time ago and have no relation to the dress, and the belt of her dress has become untied and is hanging down. She looks clean and dowdy— Hellman

}

{

surely ... it was old-fashioned, dowdy, savored of moth-eaten furs, bugles, cameos and black-edged notepaper, to go ferreting into people's pasts?— Woolf

}

{

so dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymnbook— Wilde

}

Frowzy suggests a lazy lack of neatness, order, and cleanliness

{

a dumpy, frowzy woman, clad in old dress and apron— Coutts

}

{

theater packed, and just as dirty and frowzy as when I first entered it in the year 1903— Bennett

}

but frowzy also may apply to a natural and not unwholesome disorder

{

white spruce, and the frowzy, slender jack pine thrive on the high land— Rowlands

}

{

a live oak, frowzy with dry Resurrection ferns that the first rain startles to green life— M. S. Douglas

}

or it may suggest drab misery and squalor as an inevitable result of circumstances

{

a frowzy feeling, a mean, sleepy, stupid, fed-up, incomplete feeling— Jonas

}

{

one may see women like this in poor districts . . . not quite anxious, not quite starved, but by circumstances reduced to a daily diet of frowzy economy— Swinnerton

}

{

if a fully fed, presentably clothed, decently housed, fairly literate and cultivated and gently mannered family is not better than a half-starved, ragged, frowzy, overcrowded one, there is no meaning in words— Shaw

}

Blowsy implies dishevelment or disorder

{

her hair, so untidy, so blowsy— Austen

}

to which is often added a notion of crudity or coarseness or grossness

{

that blowsy hoyden of an America that existed when Grant was accounted a statesman and Longfellow an epic poet— Sinclair Lewis

}

{

the pleasant but plebeian scent of Bouncing Bet, that somewhat blowsy pink of old English gardens— Peattie

}

Analogous words: slovenly, unkempt, disheveled, sloppy, *slipshod

Contrasted words: *neat, tidy, trim, spick-and-span