Ramshackle meaning

Adjective: ramshackle

Pronunciation: (ram,sha-kul)

Ramshackle meaning: In deplorable condition.

Synonyms: bedraggled, broken-down, derelict, dilapidated, tatterdemalion, tumble-down

Quotations: Nelson Mandela – The curious beauty of African music is that it uplifts even as it tells a sad tale. You may be poor, you may have only a ramshackle house, you may have lost your job, but that song gives you hope. African music is often about the aspirations.

Ambrose Bierce – Pertaining to a certain order of architecture, otherwise known as the Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United States are of the ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects preferred the Ironic. Recent additions to the White House in Washington are Theo-Doric, the ecclesiastic order of the Dorian’s. They are exceedingly fine and cost one hundred dollars a brick.

Amanda McCabe – Maybe it was this place, this strange, ramshackle, warm-hearted place, that had given his wife that air of laughing, welcoming life. Because here she bloomed. With him she had faded and he had faded with her. Yet here she was, his Jane again. His hope. And he had never, ever wanted to hope again.

Mehmet Murat Ildan  – However steep or ramshackle they may be, don’t ever despise the stairs which take you up to higher levels!

Mona Simpson – In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being, I had to steal out through the brambly side of the house, along the driveway down to the street.

V.S. Pritchett – The only serious rival to Pepys is Boswell, but Boswell is a snail without a shell. He trails through life unhoused and exclamatory, whereas Pepys is housed and sotto voce. Boswell is confessional before anything else, whereas, though he too tells all, Pepys is not; he records for the sensual pleasure of record. Boswell adores his damned soul to the point of tears and is in shameless, ramshackle pursuit of father-figures who will offer salvation. Unlike Pepys, he has above all a conceit of his own peculiar genius. Pepys has no notion of genius. Where Pepys is an eager careerist, struck by the wonder of it, Boswell has no career; he has only a carousel, and it is odd that the careerist has a more genuine sense of pleasure than the Calvinist libertine.

Virginia Woolf – 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.

Sample sentences:

1. That is a ramshackle old pier.
2. It is ramshackle and very messy, but they are not really poor.
3. Difficulty is not to be met by running to the opposite extreme in the assertion of a loose and ramshackle one.
4. He was trying to balance his heavy body so as not to slip out of the ramshackle old vehicle.
5. Few millionaires love to live in ramshackle cabins for known reasons.
6. They lived in a ramshackle old colonial at the end of this dirty road.
7. We all were uncomfortable perched on the ramshackle cart.
8. We found ramshackle instruments in an old house.
9. I found the ramshackle.
10. The ramshackle school building looked ready to fall over in any second.