Tattered

English

Adjective

Tattered (not comparable)

1. rent in tatters, torn, hanging in rags; ragged
   • 1919, Boris Sidis, The Source and Aim of Human Progress:

     The chattering, irrational brute of the subconscious clothes itself in the tattered garments of rationality and idealism.

2. dressed in tatters or rags; ragged
3. (obsolete) dilapidated; showing gaps or breaks; jagged; broken

Verb

tattered

1. Simple past tense and past participle of tatter.

Thesaurus

beat-up, bedraggled, blowzy, broken-down, careless, chintzy, cleft, cloven, cracked, cut, dilapidated, dingy, dowdy, down-at-heel, down-at-the-heels, drabbletailed, draggled, draggletailed, frayed, frazzled, frowzy, frumpish, frumpy, full of holes, grubby, holey, in pieces, in rags, in shreds, in tatters, informal, lacerate, lacerated, loose, lumpen, mangled, messy, mussy, mutilated, negligent, patchy, poky, quartered, ragged, raggedy, ratty, rent, riven, ruinous, run-down, scraggly, scruffy, seedy, severed, shabby, shoddy, shredded, slack, slatternly, slipshod, slit, sloppy, slovenly, sluttish, sordid, splintered, split, squalid, tacky, tatty, threadbare, torn, unkempt, unneat, unsightly, untidy

Alternative forms

• tottered

Etymology

From Middle English tatered, tatird, from tatter. Originally it was derived from the noun, but later it was treated as a past participle implying a verb. Compare tatter.

Translations

Adjective

ragged and torn

Kurdish: Sorani: شڕوشاڵ (ku) (shiRoshAL)

Serbo-Croatian: poderan (sh), razderan (sh), prnjav (sh), dronjav (sh)

dressed in tatters or rags

Serbo-Croatian: prnjav (sh), dronjav (sh)

References

• Tattered in The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, 1911
• “Tattered” in OED Online, Oxford University Press, 1989.