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ramshackle

[ram-shak-uhl]

Example Sentences Origin

adjective

loosely made or held together; rickety; shaky: a ramshackle house.

Origin:
1815–25; compare earlier rans(h)ackled, obscurely akin to ransack

Related forms

ram·shack·le·ness, noun

Synonyms
tumbledown, dilapidated, derelict, flimsy.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Ramshackle is always a great word to know.

So is lollapalooza. Does it mean:

a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes.

an extraordinary or unusual thing, person, or event; an exceptional example or instance.

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Example Sentences

These compounds are interspersed cheek-by-jowl with ramshackle townships, where improvised stalls abut open gutters.

Boxes were scattered everywhere in a ramshackle way.

Together, they move into a cramped, ramshackle apartment.

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Collins

World English Dictionary

ramshackle (ˈræmˌʃæk^əl)

—*adj*
	(esp of buildings) badly constructed or maintained; rickety, shaky, or derelict

[C17 ramshackled, from obsolete ransackle to ransack]

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

ramshackle

1830, back-formation from ramshackled, earlier ranshackled (1675), alteration of ransackled, pp. of ransackle (see ransack).

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Related Words

dilapidated jerry-built

jerry-built

Matching Quote

"The common reader ... differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure; his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out."

-Virginia Woolf

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