ADJECTIVE
-
in deplorable condition
a street of bedraggled tenements
a ramshackle old pier
a broken-down fence
a tumble-down shack -
not in working order
had to push the broken-down car
a broken-down tractor fit only for children to play on
How To Use broken-down In A Sentence
- Outside armies have toppled Afghanistan's government and installed a new one, but it controls only its broken-down capital and very little of the vast country beyond.
- I followed her to a broken-down shed with a rotting rowing boat outside. MAN AND WIFE
- Despite this, none of the newer buses has been assigned to the route, so Victoria buses, slow and lumbering old cows, are often broken-down, causing even more frequent delays.
- A Stanway traffic police spokesman said: ‘The traffic congestion had been due to broken-down vehicles.’
- Unlike an out-of-service subway car, a broken-down section of sidewalk could not simply be shunted aside.
- We could tell from the smell and the noises that our bus was making that it wasn't going to get very far, and it wasn't long before we were all standing on the hard shoulder of the motorway next to a broken-down bus.
- Rather than aggrandizing its subject, this film is all about contextualizing a man hounded by comics fans and ‘broken-down hippie pest guys.’
- And just as the miner makes the broken-down gold-bearing stuff run through his constructed sluices, Nature sends all her gold in a torrent into the natural sluice which is known as the Fraser Canyon. A Tramp's Notebook
- A short time later Ripley was seen to get into his pick-up truck bearing a distinctive Native American Indian emblem and used for transporting broken-down coaches.
- Gollum is a murderer and liar, but he is also a broken-down, pathetic creature, whose torture at the hands of Sauron's minions atoned for many sins.