grubby
/ˈɡrʌbi
/adjective (grubbier, grubbiest)
1Covered with dirt; grimy: the grubby face of a young boy...
- Babies are, of course, far happier in a grubby jumpsuit covered in mud and drool than in a frilly dress festooned with ribbons.
- For eleven months its grubby surface was covered by a makeshift blue wall, screening the leisurely metamorphosis behind.
- The room has blank, unpainted walls, and a grubby green carpet covering the floor.
Synonyms
dirty, grimy, filthy, unwashed, stained, soiled, smeared, spotted, muddy, dusty, sooty;
messy, scruffy, shabby, untidy, unkempt, slovenly, slatternly, sordid, squalid;
unhygienic, unsanitary, insanitary
informal mucky, cruddy, yucky, icky
British informal manky, grotty, gungy
Northern Irish informal bogging
literary befouled, besmirched, besmeared, begrimed
rare feculent
1.1Involving dishonest or disreputable activity; sordid: the grubby business of selling arms...
- Perhaps as a society we believe the grubby hands of business should be kept off our organs, especially in death.
- Pragmatists, sensing a bottomless well of grubby dishonesty, have called for an amnesty, hoping to encourage names to be named.
- What does any of this all-consuming grubby affair have to do with the business of politics?
Derivatives
grubbily
- The ‘reality’ they defend is, in fact, the ontology of a depressive: grubbily empirical, nothing ever adding up to more than the sum of its parts, nothing worth getting worked up about, nothing connecting with nothing.
- In New York, too, business is often done grubbily.
- They were muscular, dressed grubbily, and held bottles in their hands.
grubbiness
/ noun ...- In the way the French can and Hollywood doesn't, this young woman was portrayed in all her sordid rags and grubbiness, yet somehow without quite obscuring the enchanting creature of stunning sexuality beneath.
- When, for instance, people protested against the rudeness, grubbiness and incompetence of train and bus conductors (a popular subject), the route, the date and time, and details of offensive behaviour were always given.
- He is at odds with the grubbiness of what he does to the point of getting obsessed with the cleanness of his immediate surroundings: when his medication accidentally disappears down a drain, he cleans his apartment with a toothbrush.