dowdy
/ˈdaʊdi
/adjective (dowdier, dowdiest)
(Of a person, typically a woman, or their clothes) unfashionable and unstylish in appearance: she could achieve the kind of casual chic which made every other woman around her look dowdy...
- Gone is the willowy beauty, and in her place is a thin, pinched, dowdy lady, an eccentric Victorian who wears ugly hats.
- Uncomfortable with her ‘frumpy’ appearance, she has replaced dowdy suits with bright blouses, employs a celebrity hairdresser and takes a makeup artist to rallies.
- On the cover of Time, in a spread in Life, the image of Romania's Iron Lady was stout and unsmiling, a monolith with a face of stone, dowdy clothes and unkempt hair.
Synonyms
unfashionable, frumpish, frumpy, drab, dull, old-fashioned, outmoded, out of style, not smart, inelegant, badly dressed, ill-dressed, shabby, scruffy, faded, untidy, dingy, frowzy
informal sad, tacky
British informal mumsy
Australian/New Zealand informal daggy
Derivatives
dowdily
/ adverb ...- And it's such a mind-bending, far-out trip that once-radical modernism comes to seem rather tame and dowdily down-to-earth.
dowdiness
/ noun ...- The Bridgwater end is probably the least attractive, showing more than its fair share of the graffiti, discarded trash and general dowdiness of a run-down town.
- The warm practical clothes of winter whose sole functions were to provide warmth and comfort are shed as their weight and dowdiness becomes unbearable.
- She made me feel ashamed of my relative dowdiness.
Origin
Late 16th century (as a noun): from dowd.
Rhymes
- alloerotism
- alloesthesia
- all of
- all of a doodah
- all-of-a-piece
- (all) of a piece
- all-of-a-pieceness
- (all) of a sudden
- all of a tremble
- allogamous
- allogamy
- allogeneic
- allogeneity
- allogeneous
- allogenic
- allogenous
- allograft
- allograph
- allographic
- allogrooming
- alloimmune
- alloimmunisation
- alloimmunity
- alloimmunization
- allokine