shoddy

UK/ˈʃɒd.i/US/ˈʃɑ.di/

adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,475 of 15,258neutral

Shoddy means badly made or badly done. Shoddy work, a shoddy repair, shoddy treatment.

It carries contempt rather than mere criticism, and it implies somebody cut corners knowingly. Shoddy was first a noun: cloth made from shredded old rags, which looked passable and wore out fast, and the adjective grew straight out of that.

Definitions of shoddy

1adjectiveshoddyBadly made or badly done.C1
“The builders did such shoddy work that the roof started leaking within a month.”

shoddy is a quality of workmanship.

Where it comes from

First a noun for cheap cloth woven from shredded rags, in the Yorkshire mills of the early nineteenth century.

Built from

shoad · English — loose stone and rubble; fragments

unknown, but possibly from shoad (“loose stone and rubble; fragments”), equivalent to shoad + y*; or possibly from the Arabic word for reuse. Shoad was of inferior quality for building.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Repair & Damage

Practise this word

shoddy in the wild

The area was one of the key textile centres in Yorkshire, famed for its production of shoddy and mungo.
Heavy Woollen District
Machinery invented in Batley to grind soft rags (shoddy) is thought to have first been devised in 1813, and for hard rags (mungo) later on.
Heavy Woollen District
The destroyed homes were hastily rebuilt by the city, but were later condemned after years of attempted repairs to the shoddy construction.
Cobbs Creek, Philadelphia
But the shoddy treatment I've had over the past two or three years had to end.
Extreme Honey
When combing wool, the discarded short fibres are called noils, and are ground up into shoddy.
Combing

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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