All words

unkempt

Meaning

Lacking neatness or order; disheveled.

Examples by difficulty

Basic: Simple, everyday vocabulary — the easiest to read.

He hadn't showered in days, his hair sticking out in all directions. His clothes were rumpled and stained. He looked so unkempt, like he had just rolled out of bed and forgotten to get dressed properly.

The explorer slumped by the campfire, his beard so unkempt it caught stray embers. Days without a comb left him feeling lost, his thoughts as tangled as the knots in his hair, a visible sign of his total surrender to the wilderness.

The attic crawlspace was a mess. Dust motes danced in the single shaft of light, illuminating piles of forgotten junk and cobwebs. His hair felt rough and unkempt, sticking to his forehead with sweat as he rummaged through the disheveled mess, searching for the old photographs.

Bartholomew's hair was so unkempt, a family of squirrels had built a nest in it. His beard looked like a bird's shoe collection, and his socks? Well, let's just say they were more abstract art than foot coverings.

Barnaby the badger’s burrow was a disaster zone. He tripped over a misplaced acorn, landing face-first in a pile of unkempt moss. A lone, stray sock dangled from a twig, evidence of his wild, untamed bachelor lifestyle.

Normal: Standard, everyday language.

He sighed, looking at the overgrown weeds choking the garden. His clothes were stained and his hair was matted, a reflection of his unkempt life since the accident. Everything felt out of control.

The old man’s beard, long and unkempt, bristled with stray bits of dried moss and lichen. He hadn't bothered to trim it since the last lunar bloom, his focus instead on deciphering the shifting patterns of the phosphorescent fungi growing on the cavern walls, a vital sign for the burrowing beetle migration.

The prospect of the judges arriving made him frantic. His workshop, usually a place of methodical chaos, was a disaster. Tools lay scattered amongst half-finished contraptions, and his beard, normally tamed, was unkempt and sticking out at odd angles, mirroring his panicked state.

Barnaby's hair was perpetually unkempt, looking as though he wrestled a badger each morning and lost. His socks rarely matched, and his beard often housed rogue crumbs from forgotten snacks, a testament to his wonderfully disheveled approach to life.

Bartholomew's pet badger, Reginald, emerged from his burrow looking thoroughly unkempt, a tangle of dried grass and questionable fuzz clinging to his fur. He sniffed the air with the nonchalance of a forgotten sock, his usually sleek coat now resembling a forgotten wig after a hurricane.

Advanced: Richer vocabulary that stretches an upper-level reader.

He slumped against the wall, his once-neat uniform now unkempt. Tears had streaked through the dirt on his face, and his hair fell in tangled clumps around his shoulders. The exhaustion was clear, his entire posture a testament to a battle lost.

The researcher hunched over his scattered notes, his hair unkempt and his shirt stained with an indeterminate substance. Days blurred into nights as he chased the elusive phantom of a unified field theory, each failed equation leaving him more disheveled and desperate.

The lighthouse keeper’s beard was long and unkempt, tangled with salt spray and the dust of forgotten logbooks. He barely noticed, his gaze fixed on the churning, grey expanse, his mind lost in the rhythmic sigh of the wind and the distant wail of a foghorn.

Barnaby's apartment was a testament to his unique approach to domesticity; the overflowing laundry hamper resembled a fuzzy, unkempt mountain range, and stray socks waged a silent, yet persistent, war against the vacuum cleaner. His houseplants, long deprived of watering, appeared to be staging a dramatic, leafy protest.

Bartholomew, a renowned inventor of self-tying shoelaces, sported an appearance as chaotic as his workshop. His beard, perpetually unkempt, housed a family of rogue dust bunnies, and his spectacles, perched precariously, had a distinct lean, mirroring his own precarious balance atop a tower of half-finished contraptions.

Challenging: Rare, high-register vocabulary for serious word lovers.

He sat hunched, a picture of profound dejection, his clothes unkempt and his hair matted. The stark disarray mirrored the desolation he felt, a profound lack of order clinging to him like a shroud.

The alchemist's laboratory was a testament to his obsessive focus; shelves overflowed with esoteric reagents, and scrolls lay scattered across the workbench, his own appearance equally unkempt with ink-stained fingers and tangled beard, a stark contrast to the meticulous arrangement of his volatile experiments.

The ancient cartographer, a recluse devoted to celestial charts, lived amidst a perpetual blizzard of parchment scraps and stray ink splatters. His beard, a testament to years of singular focus, was utterly unkempt, its tangled strands mirroring the labyrinthine constellations he painstakingly rendered, a visceral map of his world.

Bartholomew's coiffure, a veritable unkempt menagerie of matted filaments and errant wisps, cascaded with the disheveled abandon of a flock of startled pigeons. It was a hirsute testament to his singular dedication to philosophical rumination, utterly eschewing the frivolous adornments of mundane grooming.

Bartholomew's beard, an audacious testament to his unkempt devotion to cryptid research, resembled a subterranean ecosystem, teeming with what he affectionately termed "philosophical lint." It perpetually housed nascent fungal colonies and the occasional errant earthworm, a disheveled testament to his singular focus.

Difficulty

Normal — Everyday words worth reinforcing.

Appears in

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