Shabby means worn out and scruffy from too much use. A shabby armchair with the stuffing showing at one corner, shabby trainers, a shabby hotel where the carpet has gone shiny in the doorway.
Shabby describes things far more than people, and when it does describe a person it is their clothes you mean. It has a second, sharper sense: mean and unfair. A shabby trick, shabby treatment of the staff, that was a shabby thing to do to her. Two fixed phrases are worth having — shabby chic, the style that makes new furniture look pleasantly old, and not too shabby, slang for surprisingly good. The b doubles when the word grows: shabbier, shabbiest, shabbily, shabbiness.
1adjectiveshabbyWorn out and untidy from long use.
“He was still wearing that shabby brown jacket.”
synonyms: tattered, scruffy, threadbare
2adjectivemeanMean and unfair in the way somebody is treated.
“Sacking her by email was a shabby end to thirty years.”
Also accepted in games: tattered
Shabby is nothing more than shab with -y stuck on the end, the same ending that makes dusty and lumpy. Shab is a word English has quietly dropped; it survives only inside this one adjective. The trail behind it runs back to a Proto-Indo-European root, *skabʰ-.
Proto-Indo-European
*skabʰ-
English, today
shabby
The adjective is derived from shab + -y. The verb is derived from the adjective. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Clothes & Fashion, Sharper Adjectives