shoddy.
Of poor quality or construction.
Meaning & usage
Of poor quality or construction.
Do not settle for shoddy knives if you are serious about cooking.
Poor; low.
Do not settle for shoddy quality in your kitchen knives.
Pretentious, sham, counterfeit.
Ambitious by reason of newly-acquired wealth; nouveau riche.
Where this word comes from
* 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. * The modern adjectival sense was apparently derived from inexpensive shoddy (“fabric from wool-processing byproduct”), which was not really suitable for (but was sometimes still used for) things such as military uniforms at the beginning of the US Civil War.
A low-grade cloth made from by-products of wool processing, or from recycled wool.
Worthless goods.
Vulgar pretence or sham.
Where this word comes from
* 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. * The modern adjectival sense was apparently derived from inexpensive shoddy (“fabric from wool-processing byproduct”), which was not really suitable for (but was sometimes still used for) things such as military uniforms at the beginning of the US Civil War.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.