Ragged means worn to pieces — torn, frayed, hanging in loose strips. A jumper gone at the cuffs, a scarecrow's coat, a flag left on a pole through three winters.
It travels well beyond cloth. A ragged edge is rough and uneven: a ragged tear across a page, a ragged line of hills against the sky. A ragged performance is untidy — the players all coming in a fraction apart. And a person can look ragged after a hard fortnight, meaning hollow-eyed and unkempt at once. Say it as two syllables, RAG-id, not as one; the -ed here is an old adjective ending, not a past tense. Run someone ragged is the fixed phrase, and it means to wear them out completely.
1adjectiveraggedOld, torn, and hanging in loose strips.
“He wore the same ragged coat through every winter.”
synonyms: tattered, frayed
2adjectivewearingWearing torn clothes; worn out and unkempt.
“A ragged crowd was waiting outside the depot before dawn.”
3adjectiveroughRough and uneven in shape or outline.
“The paper had a ragged edge where someone had torn it out.”
4adjectiveuntidyUntidy and badly co-ordinated.
“The first verse was ragged, and after that the choir settled.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: tattered
Ragged came into Middle English from the Norse-speaking north, where Old Norse rǫgvaðr meant tufted and Norwegian still has ragget, shaggy. The picture behind the word is not so much torn as hairy — a surface with bits sticking out of it. That is still the test for whether something is ragged: it has loose ends.
Middle English
ragged
English, today
ragged
From Middle English ragged, from gmq -. Compare with Old Norse rǫgvaðr (“tufted”) and Norwegian ragget (“shaggy”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA