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Mangy   Listen
adjective
mangy  adj.  (compar. mangier; superl. mangiest)  
1.
Infected with the mange; scabby.
2.
Shabby; worn-out; seedy; run-down; squalid; as, a mangy old coat; a mangy tavern.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mangy" Quotes from Famous Books



... of the door was a heap of rubbish, upon which a litter of kittens had just been thrown, making an essay of their young voices as we passed; and a little farther, on a similar mound, a colony of puppies had been planted, guarded by a mangy mother, which, by their united cries, left us nothing to desire in the way of discord. Between these was situated the gate of Osman Aga's house, into which we entered. It was a small building, consisting of some crazy rooms, which ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... months, even had we eaten nothing else. Our black friends—with the exception of one lad who desired to remain—left us one morning at sunrise, and we saw them no more. I am afraid they were deeply hurt by our poisoning half a dozen of their mangy dogs, which were, with the rest of the pack, a continual source of annoyance to us by their ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke

... into Barney Kiernan's and there, sure enough, was the citizen up in the corner having a great confab with himself and that bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen, and he waiting for what the sky would drop in the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... described what calls itself my garden here—three acres of kitchen-garden, and a quarter of an acre of flower-garden, divided into three straight strips, bordered with mangy box, and separated from the vegetables by a white-washed paling. I am the more provoked with this, because there are certain capabilities about the place; money is spent in keeping it up, and three men, entitled gardeners, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... plaintiff himself went into the witness-box—and Mahony's feelings became involved as well. This his adversary!—this poor old mangy greybeard, who stood blinking a pair of rheumy eyes and weakly smiling. One did not pit oneself against such human flotsam. Drunkard was stamped on every inch of the man, but this morning, in odd exception to the well-primed crew around him, he was sober—bewilderedly ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... I said! For God's sake get that little red-eyed, mangy cur out of here while we're eating, can't you? Good gad! can't a man eat a meal in this joint without having that dirty cur whining around? Get him down off your dress there, Mae. Get out, you little cur! ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... drooped; with a deep sigh he turned and left the tent. He took up a position near the entrance, however, and sat down resignedly. So meek, indeed, did the poor dog look that six mangy-looking curs felt their dastardly hearts emboldened to make a rush at ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... themselves. No one now despises an unselfish woman simply because she prefers to remain single; but formerly old maids were looked on nearly everywhere with a contempt that reached its climax among the Southern Slavs, who, according to Krauss (Ploss, II., 491), treated them no better than mangy dogs. No one associated with them; they were not tolerated in the spinning-room or at the dances; they were ridiculed and derided; were, in short, regarded as a disgrace ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... old man panicky for the moment, and he stretched forth a palsied hand which wandered tremblingly over the small heap of dry wood beside him. Reassured that it was indeed there, his hand returned to the shelter of his mangy furs, and he again fell to listening. The sulky crackling of half-frozen hides told him that the chief's moose-skin lodge had been struck, and even then was being rammed and jammed into portable compass. The chief was his son, stalwart and strong, head man of the tribesmen, and ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London

... the full benefit of it, and it so mauled him, though he bent his head low and tried to present nothing but the mangy cap to it, that he dropped under the lee of a tier of shipping, and they lay there until it was over. The squall had come up, like a spiteful messenger before the morning; there followed in its wake a ragged tear of light which ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... customer cast the delicacy at the head of the stall-man and missed him, the corpus delicti falling into the gutter where it was at once appropriated and rapt away by an incredulous, delighted, and mangy cat. A crude, commonplace, malodorous little street row, the sort of thing that happens, in varying phases, on a dozen East-Side corners seven days in ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... occupying himself by keeping year after year a carefully tabulated record of weather variations. Once or twice a month during the warm season he stumbled into Wildman's and, sitting by the stove, talked boastfully of the accuracy of his records and the doings of a mangy dog that trotted at his heels. In his present mood the endless sameness and uneventfulness of the man's life seemed to Sam amusing and in ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson

... lustful and stupid one,... thou lean sow, famine-stricken and most impure,... thou wrinkled beast, thou mangy beast, thou beast of all beasts the most beastly,... thou mad spirit,... thou bestial and foolish drunkard,... most greedy wolf,... most abominable whisperer,... thou sooty spirit from Tartarus!... ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... mangy fox outside Prior's Wood; and it was not till the afternoon was getting on that they found a rover lying out ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant

... Piegan camp was greeted by a discordant chorus of yelps and howls from a pack of mangy, half-starved curs of all breeds, shapes and sizes, the invariable and inevitable concomitants of an Indian encampment. The squaws, who had been busy superintending the pots and pans in which simmered the morning meal of their lords and ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor

... was dressed like a fat idol, in silk and false pearls. There the idolatry ceased. In her hand was an umbrella and on her head a hat of rose-leaves which a black topknot surmounted. About her shoulders was a feather boa. It seemed a bit mangy. Seated on Cassy's bed she looked at a window that gave on a wall. Cassy was standing. Behind Cassy was a door which the extinguished light had closed. Beyond, in the living-room, was the marquis. Anything that he did not ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... corrumpunt otia corpus. A horse in a stable that never travels, a hawk in a mew that seldom flies, are both subject to diseases; which left unto themselves, are most free from any such encumbrances. An idle dog will be mangy, and how shall an idle person think to escape? Idleness of the mind is much worse than this of the body; wit without employment is a disease [1549]Aerugo animi, rubigo ingenii: the rust of the soul, [1550]a plague, a hell itself, Maximum animi nocumentum, Galen, calls it. [1551]"As ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... of the crew—a fellow, as Dunburne could indefinitely perceive by the dim light of the lanthorn and the faint illumination of the misty half-moon, possessing a great, coarse red face and a bullet head surmounted by a mildewed and mangy fur cap— bawled out, in reply, that if they would only put their boat near enough for a minute or two he would give them a bellyful of something that would make them quiet for the rest of the night. He added that he would ask for nothing better than to have the opportunity ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle

... said Hal, "you can do the poor fool no further good! but only bring the pack about the ears of the mangy hound." And he sang a stave appropriated by a greater man ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... always most Irish when most moved. "I reckon," he went on, and the rolling intonation fell from his tongue like a faint breath from the green isle itself, "I reckon I did it just to show my friends what a measly, coyote, white-livered, tackey, ornery, spavined, colicky, mangy, blitherin' sort of a beast I am. Sure, now, Judge, I just wanted everybody to know what a gee-whillikined damn fool I can be if I try. And they know, now. Oh, yes, they know. There's nothin' more I can tell. Hold on, Judge! Sure, and I'm thinkin' ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly

... while the sum of 300,000 ducats—that is, nearly a million francs—was good to get in any sort of circumstances. It is true that, so long as D'jem lived, Alexander was drawing an income of 180,000 livres, which as a life annuity represented a capital of nearly two millions; but when one needs ready mangy, one ought to be able to make a sacrifice in the way of discount. All the same, Alexander formed no definite plan, resolved on acting as circumstances ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... callest most uncourteously a whining whelp, hath good and solid reason for his complaint. God's blood! shall the lady that tieth my garter and shuffles the smock over my head, or the lord that steadieth my chair's back while I eat, or the other that looketh to my buck-hounds lest they be mangy, be holden by me in higher esteem and estate than he who hath placed me among the bravest of past times, and will as safely and surely set me down among the ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... often over the Idyls of the King. Here were the three, I thought—Arthur, and Launcelot, and Guinevere. This, then, I pondered, was the end of it all, of life and strife and striving and love, the weary spirits of these long- gone ones to be invoked by fat old women and mangy sorcerers, the bones of them to be esteemed of collectors and betted on horse- races and ace-fulls or to be sold for cash ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London

... is an awful shame," said the parrot as soon as the Doctor had closed the door. "Directly he comes back home, all the animals over the whole countryside get to hear of it and every sick cat and mangy rabbit for miles around comes to see him and ask his advice. Now there's a big fat hare outside at the back door with a squawking baby. Can she see the Doctor, please!—Thinks it's going to have convulsions. Stupid little thing's been eating Deadly Nightshade again, I suppose. The ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting

... Quito, the mountain capital of Ecuador, that the following passage at correspondence took place. Having occasion to buy a pair of shoes in a shop six feet by eight in size and with walls three feet thick, I noticed a mangy leopard skin on the floor. I had no Spanish. The shop-keeper had no English. But I was an adept at sign language. I wanted to know where I should go to buy leopard skins. On my scribble- pad I drew the interesting streets of a city. Then I drew a small shop, which, after much effort, I persuaded ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London

... [U.S.]; valetudinary^. unsound, unhealthy; sickly, morbid, morbose^, healthless^, infirm, chlorotic [Med.], unbraced^. drooping, flagging, lame, crippled, halting. morbid, tainted, vitiated, peccant, contaminated, poisoned, tabid^, mangy, leprous, cankered; rotten, rotten to the core, rotten at the core; withered, palsied, paralytic; dyspeptic; luetic^, pneumonic, pulmonic [Med.], phthisic^, rachitic; syntectic^, syntectical^; tabetic^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... before you at every turning. You are entreated to pay for basins of parched corn thrown to the revolting creatures by your priestly guide, and do so, but are glad when the monkeys show their appreciation from a distance. From three to four hundred of these mangy animals belong to the temple, and are held to be sacred. At Benares everything specially nasty or repulsive is protected by the ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... right up to No Man's Land at last. It was under my chin. The skyline, the last skyline before the British could look down on Bapaume, showed a mangy wood and a ruined village, crouching under repeated gobbings of British shrapnel. "They've got a battery just there, and we're making it uncomfortable." No Man's Land itself is a weedy space broken up by shell craters, with very ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells

... air. "You bum," he continued to say in bitter derision as he caught glimpses of himself of a morning in the little fragment of broken glass which, being tacked on the wall, served as mirror in the office. "You durned mangy coyote, you need a shave, but you won't get it. You need a clean shirt and a new bandanna, but you won't get them, neither—not yet awhile. You'll earn 'em by going without a drop of whisky and by forking manure fer the next six months. You ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... take the fowl!' says one: 'Mine are all bewitched, I guess; Cocks and hens with vermin run, Mangy, filthy, featherless.' Says another: 'I confess Every hair I drop, I keep— Plague upon it, in a heap Falling off to ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... the ancient church of Or San Michele, with its wonderful armorial bearings by Luca della Robbia, an old man with long white hair and beard, whom I took to be one of the mangy painters who copy the masterpieces in the Uffizi or the Pitti, passed by, and raising his hat, wished the ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux

... late. Sit down, Maggie, there, and let me get the stool and talk to you. Think of us two—Cruelty girls, both of us—two mangy kittens deserted by the old cats in a city's alleys, and left mewing with cold and hunger and dirt, out in the wet—think of us two in ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson

... the mental operation of the average woman in the State of Washington, as compared to the ossified brain operation of the gentleman from Alabama, would make him look like a mangy kitten in a tiger fight. The average woman in the State of Washington knows more about social economics and political economy in one minute than the gentleman from Alabama has demonstrated to the members of this House that he knows ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker

... pawings could not make it anything but mine—and supposit it. I hope it frets you, Weener, for the sake of your sniveling but immortal soul, I sincerely hope it rasps you like a misplaced hairshirt. You will get some miserable lickspittle to take my place, some mangy bookkeeping pimp with a permanentwaved wife and three snottynosed brats, but the spirit and guts of the Intelligencer depart with ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... prices. Also, he bootlegged systematically to the Port Belknap Indians, which fact, while a matter of common knowledge, the Government had never been able to prove. So Long Bill, making a living ostensibly by maintaining a flat-boat ferry and a few head of mangy cattle, continued to ply his despicable trade. Even passing cowboys avoided him and Long Bill was left pretty much to his ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx

... (Resolutely.) I'll go after him, General: I'll find that horse if it's alive anywhere in Italy. And I shan't forget the despatches: never fear. Giuseppe: go and saddle one of those mangy old posthorses of yours, while I get my cap and sword and things. Quick march. Off with you ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw

... supererogation to give a rsum of the public career of one so well known-one whose name has become a household word. In private life his character was equally estimable. He had ever a wag of encouragement for the young, the ill-favoured, the belaboured, and the mangy. Though his gentle spirit has passed away, he has left with us the record of his virtues as a shining example for all puppies; and the writer is pleased to admit that so far as in him lay he has himself endeavoured ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... making up in public on a balcony above the crowd, so as to whet their curiosity and attract their custom. Beyond was a cinematograph, advertised by lurid paintings of murders and apparitions; and farther on there was a circus with a mangy zoo. ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... things will come out all right. So far I have only agreeable impressions; the only thing that provokes me is that smoking is not allowed on the street. One can have no idea in what disfavor the Austrians are over here; a mangy dog will not take a piece of meat from them. I am sorry for poor Szechenyi; I do not dislike him. They will either drive things to a war from here, or let it come, and then they will stick the bayonet into the Austrians' backs; however peacefully people ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... Howland, who began to feel that the situation approximated lese-majeste. "Not happy? Confound them! When we're bringing guns to support their mangy and tottering Government!" ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry

... trapper at Isle a La Crosse being maltreated in the woods by a couple of their sneaking cutthroats and two packs of beaver taken from him for which they laughingly offered him in payment a bundle of mangy skins cast out from the summer's pickings. 'Twas Peter Brins and I'll wager that those two are marked for a long reckoning when the tables turn. And by the same Indian I hear that the young blade from Montreal with his light-haired brigade who stumbled upon us ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... Harari art. There are a few trees in the city, but it contains none of those gardens which give to Eastern settlements that pleasant view of town and country combined. The streets are narrow lanes, up hill and down dale, strewed with gigantic rubbish-heaps, upon which repose packs of mangy or one-eyed dogs, and even the best are encumbered with rocks and stones. The habitations are mostly long, flat-roofed sheds, double storied, with doors composed of a single plank, and holes for windows pierced high above the ground, and decorated ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton

... ain't the burrowin' kind of animal, and I ain't comin' in under there after yuh. Come, kitty-kitty-kitty! Come on outa there 'fore I send a charge of birdshot in after yuh!" His voice changed to a tremulous chant of rising anger. "You wall-eyed, mangy, rat-eatin' son of a gun, what have I been feedin' yuh fur all these years? You come outa there! If it wasn't for the love uh God I got in my heart, I'll fill yuh so full of holes the coyotes'll have to make soup of ye! I'll sure spread yuh out so thin ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower

... me half a score suits of clothes, each worth a thousand dinars. One day, as I was sitting alone, there came in to me an old woman with sunken cheeks and worn eyebrows, bleared eyes and broken teeth, blotched face and bald head, grizzled hair and bent and mangy body, running nose and sallow complexion, even as says the poet of the ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous

... would cure him in a few weeks that she was allowed to keep him. Dandy wasn't capable of getting really angry, but he was as disturbed about having this disease as he could be about anything. He said that he had got it from a little, mangy dog, that he had played with a few weeks before. He was only with the dog a little while, and didn't think he would take it, but it seemed he knew what an easy thing it ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders

... Charlie selected a fustian coat of extremely ragged appearance, with trousers to match, also a sealskin vest of a mangy complexion, likewise a soiled and battered billycock hat so shockingly bad that it was difficult to imagine it to have ever had ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne

... greatness, led the way up a dark and dirty flight of stairs into a room of similar character, all littered and bestrewn with odds and ends of newspapers and other crumpled fragments, both in proof and manuscript. Behind a mangy old writing-table in this apartment sat a figure with a stump of a pen in its mouth and a great pair of scissors in its right hand, clipping and slicing at a file of Rowdy Journals; and it was such ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... I e'en; would you have me wish him to die on a bundle of wet straw in yon den of his, like a mangy tyke?' ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... of a mangy she-camel! Eater of dogs! Wallower in carrion!" And then, with hardly a break: "Allah, All-Merciful, All-Compassionate! Have mercy on Thy servant! I swear by the beard of Thy holy Prophet that I will attend more closely to my duties to Thee if Thou wilt ...
— Hanging by a Thread • Gordon Randall Garrett

... you, and is very glad that you can't see him as he now appears. A shocking calamity has befallen his good looks. Some bad child—and I don't think she's a boy—has clipped that poor beastie in spots, until he looks like a mangy, moth-eaten checkerboard. No one can imagine who did it. Sadie Kate is very handy with the scissors, but she is also handy with an alibi! During the time when the clipping presumably occurred, she was occupying a stool in the ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster

... Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew—and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. One man proposed a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the White Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a memory ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... from the garden includes much Atlantic Ocean and a long stretch of sandy coast to the south, swept by the north east trade wind, and scantily nourishing a few stunted pepper trees, mangy palms, and tamarisks. The prospect ends, as far as the land is concerned, in little hills that come nearly to the sea: rudiments, these, of the Atlas Mountains. The missionary, having had daily opportunities of looking at this ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw

... the wolf go. The stillness that had settled while we gazed and the file of warriors, reining, gazed, gripped and fairly hurt. I cursed the youth. Would to God he had stayed at home—God grant that mangy wolf died by trap or poison. Our one chance made the sport of an accidental view-halloo, when all the wide ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... meanest man for hanging out on a fool thing I ever knew. And I'm just as fond of Oscar as the rest of you. What was a bull to Oscar! He could buy a dozen of 'em. Scott hasn't a thing on earth except wages for riding and that mangy little herd of ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie

... a bottle of cherry brandy he broke which we went to fetch for your aunt from Southampton. How time flies, to be sure! That can't be Polly Talboys, that bouncing girl standing by her mother at the cottage there. I remember her a mangy little urchin picking weeds in ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... my senses, I should have considered him, personally, as being rather a suspicious specimen of an old soldier. He had goggling, bloodshot eyes, mangy moustaches, and a broken nose. His voice betrayed a barrack-room intonation of the worst order, and he had the dirtiest pair of hands I ever saw—even in France. These little personal peculiarities exercised, however, no repelling influence on me. In the mad excitement, the reckless triumph ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various

... had been in my senses, I should have considered him, personally, as being rather a suspicious specimen of an old soldier. He had goggling, bloodshot eyes, mangy mustaches, and a broken nose. His voice betrayed a barrack-room intonation of the worst order, and he had the dirtiest pair of hands I ever saw—even in France. These little personal peculiarities exercised, however, ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins

... be brought to a great degree of perfection and be unique of its kind. It will tell both natives and strangers exactly what they want to know, and possess great scientific interest and importance. Whereas the ordinary lumber-room of clubs from New Zealand, Hindoo idols, sharks' teeth, mangy monkeys, scorpions, and conch shells—who shall describe the weary inutility of it? It is really worse than nothing, because it leads the unwary to look for the objects of science elsewhere than under their noses. What they want ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... stood silent and motionless as one of the mangy effigies at home, but only for an instant. Then, with a most ferocious roar, and without the slightest hesitancy or warning, he ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... the salvation of others, by excommunicating him and separating him from the Church, and furthermore delivers him to the secular tribunal to be exterminated thereby from the world by death. For Jerome commenting on Gal. 5:9, "A little leaven," says: "Cut off the decayed flesh, expel the mangy sheep from the fold, lest the whole house, the whole paste, the whole body, the whole flock, burn, perish, rot, die. Arius was but one spark in Alexandria, but as that spark was not at once put out, the whole earth was laid ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... his room he stood at gaze like a kitten of good family beholding a mangy mongrel asleep in its pink basket. For on his bed was Mrs. Zapp, her rotund curves stretching behind her large flat feet, whose soles were toward him. She was noisily somnolent; her stays creaked regularly as she breathed, except when she moved ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis

... are not only seminaries of infidelity, they are, moreover, in many cases, hot-beds of immorality. In these schools every child is received, no matter how vicious or corrupt he or his parents may be. "One mangy sheep," as the homely proverb says, "infects the whole flock." So one corrupt child in a school is capable of corrupting and ruining all the others. And, in fact, where have our young people learned the shameful habit of self-abuse, and many ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller

... there came the sound of rapid footfalls upon stone flags; a little door flew open in the wall close to me, and a small, thick-set man, huddled in the rough sheepskin of the Galician peasant, with a mangy fur cap on his head, nearly ran headlong into my arms. I was about condescendingly to interpellate him in my best Polish, when I caught the gleam of an angry yellow eye and noted the bristle of a ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various

... 'Father calls him mangy, but he isn't, really. I'm going to cut its hair to make it grow thicker. I can say all the alphabet and lots of poetry. Shall I say my piece? No; I know what I'll do, I'll get you my cards, with E for ephalunt and X for swordfish on, ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson

... and abandonment to cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral pyres is a solemn and ennobling conception. This graveyard, with its ruinous walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses festering in slime beneath neglected slabs in hollow chambers, and the mephitic wash of poisoned waters that surround it, inspires ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... nature, I suppose; they saw I had only one hand that I could hit back with. They're a mangy, half-caste lot; negroes and Zambos mostly. And then those horrible coolies! So at last I got enough of that, and set off to tramp the country at random; just wandering about, on the ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich

... falling into scrapes, and slipping out easily. Not vicious or ugly; in fact, he had thrashed Ned Thomas for robbing birds' nests, been known to rescue a miserable kitten from its tormentors, and was always bringing home sore-eyed, mangy curs to be nursed and healed. If he had cared, he could have boasted as good a pedigree as the Hopes and the Lawrences. For his grandmother was of pure old French Jacobin descent, titled too. Many ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas

... times the reckless trackers returned, most truthfully saying that the beast was mangy, undersized—a tigress worn with nursing, or a broken-toothed old male—and Bukta would ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling

... Thorne, furious at the scant courtesy shown to the lady of his dreams, had brought his whip down heftily, just above the mangy tail of the colonel ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... little girl, they put her in prison. And it wasn't a man's prison either, but a mangy, low-down, dog kennel. Think of it! Put her down there in the dark among the rats. But that was too much for the decent ones of even that crowd, and they had to let her go. So now she lives in a little house in her kingdom, like a ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... of his fangs with a cunning charmer's tom-tom;—he may pass into the foul feathers of an indiscriminately gluttonous adjutant-bird; but some day a bone will choke him;—his soul may creep under the mangy skin of a Pariah dog, and be kicked out of compounds by scullions; he may be condemned to the abominable offices of a crow at the burning ghauts, a jackal by the wells of Thuggee, or a rat in sewers; but he can never again be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... said he, "has gone mildly—mad. All day he sits dressed in his best, ready to start for Jerry-Jo's. He fancies that scapegoat of his has a mansion and fortune, and is expecting his arrival. He amuses himself by packing and unpacking a mangy old carpet-bag. Mary McAdam looks after him and the village youngsters play with him. It's rather a ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... be mangy and scabby, but am unable to find any lice on them. They eat well, but vomit a good deal and are ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson

... preservation—for when the mattress came down, it came down upon Snarleyyow. The animal contrived to clear his loins, or he would have perished; but he could not clear his long mangy tail, which was now caught and firmly fixed in a new species of trap, the widow's broadest proportions having firmly secured him by it. Snarleyyow pulled, and pulled, but he pulled in vain—he was ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat

... real savagery, therefore we must stand by it, extend it, and (in public) praise it. And so we must not utter any hateful word about England in these days, nor fail to hope that she will win in this war, for her defeat and fall would be an irremediable disaster for the mangy human race.... Naturally, then, I am for England; but she is profoundly in the wrong, Joe, and no (instructed) Englishman doubts it. At least ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... wonderful how energetic some philanthropic people are. I dare say they like the fuss. (I can't endure fuss!) And Mrs. Tabby's appearance—excellent creature!—would probably make her feel ill-at-ease in bachelor quarters, if we could change places. Her fur is really almost mangy, and she has nothing to speak of in the way of a tail. But she is a worthy soul. And some day, when the Captain and I are going to town without much luggage—or if she should happen to be collecting in the country,—I will certainly look up a few of my ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing

... from what you said, you unkind creature, when you know as well as I do, that on his account only last quarter I wouldn't buy myself a new parasol, though that old green one is frayed the whole way up, and the fringe is perfectly mangy? You know it is, Peggotty. You can't deny it.' Then, turning affectionately to me, with her cheek against mine, 'Am I a naughty mama to you, Davy? Am I a nasty, cruel, selfish, bad mama? Say I am, my child; ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... for young and decent companionship? The clean youth of him in contrast to the mangy, surly louts who haunted Clinch's Dump, — was that ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers

... of this kraal," said Masapo, "I would hunt out of it this hyena with a mangy coat and without a hole who comes to devour your meat and, perhaps," he added with meaning, "to ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard

... all the others, is built of wood, on the top of a hillock; the only accession of dignity it can boast being a little bit of mangy kitchen-garden that hangs down in front to the road, like a soiled apron. There was no lock, handle, bell, or knocker to the door, but immediately on our approach, a servant presented himself, and ushered us into the room where Count Trampe was waiting to welcome us. After ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)

... he has looked round to see that no one is listening, he tells you that a German is a mangy dog. You see, the Germans have their Kaiser, but he's nothing like as great as our Czar; I have it from a soldier who was in the hospital, and he used to say: "Bah, he's nothing compared ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... behind a curtain, looking on; and when they heard this, the youngest considered [him that was to be] her husband and saw him to be an old man, a hundred years of age, with frosted hair, drooping forehead, mangy eyebrows, slitten ears, clipped[FN69] beard and moustaches, red, protruding eyes, bleached, hollow, flabby cheeks, nose like an egg-plant and face like a cobbler's apron, teeth overlapping one another,[FN70] lips like camel's kidneys, loose and pendulous; brief, a monstrous ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous

... stumps; lively, now! This 'ere lady 's a-goin' ter take us ter her shebang ter stay mos' two weeks. Gee-whiz! Bones, ain't this great!" And with one bound he was off the platform and turning a series of somersaults on the soft grass followed by the skinny, mangy dog which was barking ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter

... me a schoolboy who has ever learned anything valuable or important by watching a mangy old lion snoring away in its cage or a family of monkeys fighting for peanuts. To get any useful instruction out of such a spectacle is palpably impossible; not even a college professor is improved by it. The most it can ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken

... street parade of any of its great and famous rivals, the street parade of this circus was a meager and disappointing thing. Why, there was only one elephant, a dwarfish and debilitated-looking creature, worn mangy and slick on its various angles, like the cover of an old-fashioned haircloth trunk; and obviously most of the closed cages were weather-beaten stake wagons in disguise. Nevertheless, there was a sizable turnout of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... decided to abandon this sterile and desolate country of Veragua, he landed at Porto Bello and on the coast which has since been named Cape Marmor, hoping to there find a more fertile soil. But such a terrible famine overtook his companions that they did not shrink from eating the carcasses of mangy dogs they had brought with them for hunting and as watch-dogs. These dogs were of great use to them in fighting with the Indians. They even ate the dead bodies of massacred Indians, for in that country there are no fruit-trees nor birds as in Darien, which explains why it is ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt

... 'tuppence all the way.' Through drink. But this Stafford was of another kind. Hell's full of such Staffords; Cloete would make fun of him, and then there would be a nasty gleam in the fellow's half-shut eye. But Cloete was generally kind to him. Cloete was a fellow that would be kind to a mangy dog. Anyhow, he used to stand drinks to that object, and now and then gave him half a crown—because the widow lady kept Mr. Stafford short of pocket-money. They had rows almost every day down ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad

... he asked with feverish impudence. "Yer may take one—says yer. Why not giv' me both? No. I'm a mangy dorg. One fur a mangy dorg. I'll tyke both. Can yer stop me? Try. Come ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad

... us to the oldest church in Vienna. As I now recollect it was six hundred years old. No; on second thought I will say it must have been older than that. No church could possibly become so moldy and mangy looking as that church in only six hundred years. The object in this church that interested me most was contained in an ornate glass case placed near the altar and alongside the relics held to be sacred. It did not ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... Haymarket Stores one day, and all round about me were dogs, waiting for the return of their owners, who were shopping inside. There were a mastiff, and one or two collies, and a St. Bernard, a few retrievers and Newfoundlands, a boar-hound, a French poodle, with plenty of hair round its head, but mangy about the middle; a bull-dog, a few Lowther Arcade sort of animals, about the size of rats, and a couple of ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome

... morning we were up and off at dawn to the Karla Caves. There was brought to the door at dawn for Richard a jibbing, backing pony, with vicious eyes, and for me a mangy horse like a knifeboard, spavined, with weak legs, and very aged, but nevertheless showing signs of "blood." On top of this poor beast was a saddle big enough for a girl of ten, and I, being eleven stone, felt ashamed to mount. However, there ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... wishes to send six talents to the Eastern army; that will be done by our bankers. Three talents to the worthy Nitager and three to the worthy Patrokles; that will be done here immediately. Sarah and her father I can pay through that mangy Azarias even better to pay them thus, for they would cheat ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... made our way slowly through the crush to the stables, then around to the dressing-rooms, where little Grigg, in his spotted clown's costume, was putting the last touches of vermilion to his white cheeks, and Horan, draped in a mangy leopard-skin to imitate Hercules, sat on his two-thousand-pound dumbbell, curling his shiny black mustache with ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

... in the search, Katherine looked carefully in the hall, but in vain, when her young assistant gave a cry of joy; she had almost trodden on them as they lay between a mangy mat and the foot ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander

... is a dancer in a travelling circus. The flare and the drum wooed me one night, and I went in. As a circus, well, you may imagine—a tent in a fair. My fauteuil was a plank, and the orchestra surpassed the worst tortures of the Inquisition. And then, after the decrepit horses, and a mangy lion, a girl came into the ring, with the most marvellous eyes I have ever seen in a human face. They are green eyes, with golden ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick

... black canal, and sick black towers of chimneys; now, a trim garden, where the flowers were bright and fair; now, a wilderness of hideous altars all a- blaze; now, the water meadows with their fairy rings; now, the mangy patch of unlet building ground outside the stagnant town, with the larger ring where the Circus was last week. The temperature changed, the dialect changed, the people changed, faces got sharper, manner got shorter, eyes got shrewder and harder; yet ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens

... deceived by the Baron, for really between old rips like us our friend's mistress should be sacred, I swore I would have his wife. It is but justice. The Baron could say nothing; we are certain of impunity. You showed me the door like a mangy dog at the first words I uttered as to the state of my feelings; you only made my passion—my obstinacy, if you will—twice as strong, and ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... no native wild dog in Ceylon, but every village and town is haunted by mongrels of European descent, that are known by the generic description of Pariahs. They are a miserable race, lean, wretched, and mangy, acknowledged by no owners, living on the garbage of the streets and sewers, and if spoken to unexpectedly they shrink with an almost involuntary cry. Yet in these persecuted outcasts there survives that germ of instinctive affection which binds the dog to the ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... results. A slipshod servant appeared and reluctantly seated me in the hall. She read with seeming interest the card I handed to her and then, pushing aside some mangy looking portieres, vanished ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates

... ancient stood before him, balancing on a single crutch. His eyes were half-filmed over by a growth of morbid membrane, and what was not yet covered shone red and irritated. His hair was mangy, standing out in isolated patches of wispy grey. His skin was scarred and wrinkled and mottled, and in colour was a purplish blue surfaced with a grey coating that might have been painted there had it not indubitably grown there and been part and ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London

... departed wagon—for testing the strength of the prisoners and beguiling any time which might lie heavily on their hands after they had regaled themselves with the horizontal bar; and finally, a dozen mangy apple-trees, fighting for their very lives in the angry soil, proclaimed to all the world that the cour itself was in ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... another fallacy, which I did not know existed until I read Mr. Spielmann's "History of Punch." In that he refers to the very "oft-quoted drawing (lately used as an advertisement), the idea of which reached him from an anonymous correspondent. It is that of a grimy, unshaven, unwashed, mangy-looking tramp, who sits down to write, with a broken quill, a testimonial for a firm of soap-makers. A further point of interest about this famous sketch was that Charles Keene was deeply offended by it at first, in the groundless belief that it was ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... It was in Champagne-Pouilleuse—mangy Champagne it is called, because it has none of the richness of the vineyard country, but is a great stretch of barren land through which the chalk breaks out in bald patches. The spirit of war brooded over all this countryside, and ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... I said. "Stiff with microbes. Tribes of mangy lovers prowling round the house. A nest of kittens in my ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various

... earth from head to foot, strutted to and fro restlessly. When we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies; they shook towards the fierce river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin with a pendent tail—something that looked a dried gourd; they shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... ashamed of his fellow-worshippers. "Lie down with dogs, and you'll get up with fleas," says an old Irish adage; but what, in the name of all entomology, is a man to get up with who lies down with these votaries of Garibaldi? So fine a fellow, and so mangy a following, it would be hard to find. The opportunity for all the blatant balderdash of shopkeeping eloquence, of that high "Falootin" style so popular over the Atlantic, of those grand-sounding periods about freedom ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever

... the affair of this morning, I can't tell you; my client is a crafty, mangy cur, and he is sure ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... Nevertheless, the king of beasts being at a distance, and occupied, and Staines a brave man, and out of sight, he kept his ground and watched, and by those means saw a sight never to be forgotten. The lion rose up, and stood in the sun incredibly beautiful as well as terrible. He was not the mangy hue of the caged lion, but a skin tawny, golden, glossy as a race-horse, and of exquisite tint that shone like pure gold in the sun; his eye a lustrous jewel of richest hue, and his mane sublime. He looked towards ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade

... soiled collar; breakfast in dress clothes; a wet house-dog, over-affectionate; the other fellow's tooth-brush; an echo of "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay"; the damp, musty smell of an empty house; stale beer; a mangy fur coat; Katzenjammer; false teeth; the criticism of Hamilton Wright Mabie; boiled cabbage; a cocktail after dinner; an old cigar butt; ... the kiss of Evelyn after the ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken

... of the shingle roof, Squaw Charley looked out. He sat on his heels, about him the few mangy dogs that had not found the dinner-pot. One of these stirred. Half rising, he gave it a kick, just as one of his brothers might have done. Then he squatted again, and through the ragged strands of his ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates

... laugh—Morgan is a wonderful mimic. Well, he remembered suddenly, as I said, that he was a mighty good ventriloquist, and he saw his chance. He gave a great jump like a startled fawn, and threw up his arms and stared like one demented into the tree over their heads. There was a mangy-looking crow sitting up there on a branch, and Morgan pointed at him as if at something marvellous, supernatural, and all those fool Indians stopped pow-wowing and stared up after him, as curious as monkeys. Then to all appearances, the crow began to talk. Morgan ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)



Words linked to "Mangy" :   mangey, worn, manginess



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