Adjective: haggard
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more haggard |
| Superlative | most haggard |
Sample Sentences
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Pale and haggard faces.
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A gradual descent into a haggard and feeble state.
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The years of hardship made her look somewhat haggard.
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Staring his eyes, and haggard was his look. [1685, John Dryden, The Despairing Lover:]
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Then there was a pale, care-wrinkled woman, not old, but haggard, and already with streaks of gray among her hair, like silver ribbons; one of those women, naturally delicate, whom you at once recognize as worn to death by a brute—probably, a drunken brute—of a husband, and at least nine children. [1851 April 9, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, a Romance, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, →OCLC:]
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I looked at the morning / After being up all night / I looked at my haggard face in the bathroom light / I looked out the window / And I saw that ragged soul take flight [1976, Joni Mitchell, “Black Crow”, in Hejira:]
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By the end of two weeks there isn't a county in England where he hasn't pledged his holiness six different ways — which is not to deny that intermittently he has visions of himself as a haggard apostle of the life renounced, converting beautiful women and millionaires to Christian poverty. [1986, John le Carré, A Perfect Spy:]
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a haggard or refractory hawk
Adjectives inflected like haggard
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
From Middle French haggard, from Old French faulcon hagard (“wild falcon”) ( > French hagard (“dazed”)), from Middle High German hag (“coppice”) ( > archaic German Hag (“hedge, grove”)). Akin to Frankish *hagia ( > French haie (“hedge”)) See: French Adjectives '
hagard', French Adjectives '
haie'.