How To Use Dowdy In A Sentence
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If the traditional image of the empty-nester is dowdy, sad and purposeless, she could not be further from it.
Times, Sunday Times
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Once you get to a size 14 you find that most swimwear in the shops is dowdy and frumpy.
The Sun
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One wrong call, she thought, and the entire country was in danger of looking dowdy and unstylish.
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(Read The Observer's extensive coverage here.) "Save The Hotel" activist Gregory Jones once took issue with my use of the term "fleabag" to describe the dowdy would-be landmark on Seventh Avenue.
Win Trip To 'Luxurious' Hotel Pennsylvania!
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So, ditch those dowdy greys and dip a toe in the new blues.
Times, Sunday Times
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What a nice way to show that dressing modestly doesn't have to mean "dowdy" or "drab"!
The Value of Clothing in Creating a Mood
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a clean and sunny but completely dowdy room
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Dowdy gets a makeover, becomes unrecognisably beautiful, love blossoms.
Times, Sunday Times
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Only the dowdy daughter, Martha, treats him with kindness, teaching him to read and shielding him occasionally from her siblings' harshest jibes.
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I've walked past it loads of times and from the outside always thought it was just a dowdy 70s office block.
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The choice of hard-wearing, if dowdy, plastics and fabrics inside means that intergalactic mileages can be covered with little sign of wear.
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It makes her look like a rather dowdy and unhappy provincial lady mayoress.
Times, Sunday Times
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Her outfits are dowdy rather than daring.
Times, Sunday Times
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His hands, which he'd put lightly on his wife's shoulders to persuade her to go home, felt something very irregular underneath that sensible, dowdy dress.
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Television pundits lambasted her image as a frumpy housewife who delivered dull speeches while clad in dowdy grey or brown suits.
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In Rook-land the rowdy-dowdy, randy-dandy, rollicky-ranky boys get up very early in the morning and go to bed in the afternoon.
Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
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She makes me feel dowdy and ugly.
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How else to explain her deglamorized look and dowdy outfit?
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Weil's recipes for unfussy summer desserts like easy blackberry cobbler, juicy peach pandowdy, and warm blueberry grunt leave no excuse for not taking advantage of summer fruit at its peak.
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I feel so dowdy and frumpy.
The Sun
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I feel so dowdy and frumpy.
The Sun
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She writes a weekly series called The Beseleys for a nameless and dowdy woman's magazine of the sort Dewar helped to fill when she was a jobbing journalist.
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I had braces and dowdy clothes, and a particularly enormous vocabulary.
Times, Sunday Times
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During the past decade, structured flat shoes have been unmentionably ‘out’ and dowdy.
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Gone is the willowy beauty, and in her place is a thin, pinched, dowdy lady, an eccentric Victorian who wears ugly hats.
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Take a dowdy young spinster, before, add make-up, hair, a new wardrobe - and shazam - after she's a movie-star.
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It is no longer a dowdy game played by culchies; it is now cool, trendy and, of course, lucrative for businesses that are along for the ride.
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Several dowdy ladies gravitated towards them, bringing cups plates and enquiring minds.
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The style in her dark red hair was gone and she felt dowdy, unattractive.
THE TOUCH OF INNOCENTS
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Denise was last seen on our screens playing the dowdy mother of six, Edie McClure, in Born & Bred.
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Then I went to the other end of the spectrum and wore dowdy clothes.
The Sun
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Eugenia at her marriage; and you know as well as I do what a ninny he is for his pains; for what a poor little dowdy thing will she look, dizened out in jewels and laces? '
Camilla
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Near the top of every economic cycle I reach into what I call my fridge and medicine chest stocks, all of which have been thrown away because no one wants dowdy old Procter or General Mills or Colgate when things are booming.
Jim Cramer's Real Money
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Gone is the willowy beauty, and in her place is a thin, pinched, dowdy lady, an eccentric Victorian who wears ugly hats.
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It took me a long time to realize that Oprah is not my friend, she is really a mocker of faithful, (dowdy?), mothers, even though she says her biggest mission is to help us moms out (by giving us all make-overs, I guess - that's everyone's answer to all problems).
Portrait in Blue, by Gabriel Nicolet, 1856-1921
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Have a look at this for a brilliant exposé of how the real flesh, blood, mousy hair and freckles of a 'dowdy' girl next door can be transformed into an unattainable goddess.
Supermodel Erin O'Connor slams fashion world for lying to women
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The P's take us from pandowdy to pompey to pudjicky; the Q's offer qualmish, quick start, and quiddle; in R we find ramstugious, redd up, robin snow, and rumpelkammer; and S yields saluggi, say-so, and smearcase.
VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XXIII No 4
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The galaxy of handsome women that formed the court of the Emperor had perhaps sent beauty somewhat out of fashion; for the high-born ladies who took their place were what we should call dowdy, and had nothing distinguished in their appearance.
Reminiscences of Captain Gronow
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a dowdy grey outfit
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He could see the battered standard lamp, the mirror, the dowdy wallpaper.
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Add a little debt to the balance sheet—my editor used the quaint English jargon "gearing" instead of the now-famous "leverage"—and any dowdy financial firm can transform itself into a high-octane profit machine.
'Lazy' Banks Make Sense
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But anything other than long or short now feels dowdy.
Times, Sunday Times
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Apple Pandowdy is one of a family of simple desserts, known in different parts of the world as cobblers, duffs, grunts, slumps and pandowdies.
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Lightly sweetened peaches peek through the top crust in this adorable pandowdy.
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Henry enjoyed his school, which was called the Anglo-American and was housed in the rather dowdy buildings of what had once been a Soviet school.
Henry’s Demons
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And before you got to the former marshlands, several suburbs comprised of nothing but two-dollar shops, dowdy brick semi-detacheds and dozens of gawking fresh air watchers had to be negotiated.
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The hair and make-up is pretty dowdy too.
The Sun
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Her Aunt Mimi isn't beautiful, at least on the outside: she buries her features beneath thick powder, marches around in dowdy clothes and looks old beyond her years.
A Grownup Look at Lennon as a 'Boy'
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There are mallards galore, the males with their metallic green heads and the females a dowdy brown, and busy little black scaups, bobbing like bath toys.
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Also, women are so worried about appearing "dowdy," but these paintings do not show magnificent clothing, just feminine clothing -- skirts and dresses.
Archive 2009-07-01
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It's when we met the Ramsays and Robinsons, got whipped up in the romance of Scott and Charlene, hated Mrs Mangel but fancied her dowdy granddaughter Jane, and laughed along to the "larrikin" japes of Des
Hecklerspray
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Once you get to a size 14 you find that most swimwear in the shops is dowdy and frumpy.
The Sun
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Too English for the cosmopolitans, too traditional for the modernists, too religious for the secular and too dowdy for the jet set, the Three Choirs now finds it hard to claim a place in the charmed circle.
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Winslet, wearing a figure-hugging corset-style black dress and a faded denim jacket, said it was lucky she had been cast in a dowdy role, because her weight ballooned during filming, which ended when she was six months pregnant.
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So, ditch those dowdy greys and dip a toe in the new blues.
Times, Sunday Times
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I feel so dowdy and frumpy.
The Sun
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Tapestries, to me, had always been dim and dowdy things ravaged by time that no one but an academic drudge could like.
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That's not to say that our aging pair of (now slightly dowdy) French rascals are going to be pulling their punches at all.
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I saw several comments about dowdy dresses being discouraging, but can a dress, any dress, be any dowdier than a pair of dirty jeans with frayed cuffs dragging on the floor picking up dust, with the clunky horrid dirty sports shoes?
Blue Dress Painting
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Who knew Webster's would define ‘dowdy’ as ‘lacking in smartness or taste’?
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Uncomfortable with her ‘frumpy’ appearance, she has replaced dowdy suits with bright blouses, employs a celebrity hairdresser and takes a makeup artist to rallies.
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Zeke: I love to bake! Strudels, scones, even apple pandowdy.
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You can imagine my disappointment when I was issued with my flying suit, a dowdy navy blue number complete with fetching leather skullcap.
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I feel so dowdy and frumpy.
The Sun
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Notable and new, to me at least, was the spectacle of matronly gents dressing up as their mothers, aunties and schoolmarms in dowdy conservative outfits, cheerlessly dispensing disapproval over all.
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The hair and make-up is pretty dowdy too.
The Sun
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She wore what was for her fairly dowdy garb: a low-cut figure-hugging black gown that showed up her deep red hair to advantage.
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He has a rumpled, boyish look to him, resembling the actor Michael Keaton in dowdy pinstripes and a button-down shirt.
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From Canada to Texas, you will find a crisp, a crunch, a grunt, a brown betty, a buckle and even a pandowdy.
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Her mother, a dingy old dowager, with bad teeth, dowdy gowns, a profusion of artificial flowers, and a strong addiction to tea and knitting, perfectly understood the duties of duennaship, and did propriety by her daughter's side at dinner-table and promenade.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847
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Velvet has thrown off its dowdy image for autumn.
Times, Sunday Times
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Motoring journalists dismiss them as dowdy and dull, awful to drive and worse to look at.
Times, Sunday Times
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Cash-strapped sponsors of table tennis, billiards and badminton are seriously considering a change in uniform so that its women players look less dowdy and more fetching.
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Britain was once the nation of a notoriously dowdy pallet - stodgy pies, marmite, and spaghetti on toast.
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The choice of hard-wearing, if dowdy, plastics and fabrics inside means that intergalactic mileages can be covered with little sign of wear.
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While girlie, they weren't prim or dowdy, which is surely important to Stuart's typically young customer - someone like Emma Roberts, who sat in the front row.
ABC News: Top Stories
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It is only a few miles, but it's a transition from a dowdy, reactionary, seaside resort to a busy, wired-up entrepôt, connected to Europe and the modern world.
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He was wearing a long, dowdy beige jacket, the edges of which were marked with mud and grass stains.
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She looked dowdy and plain in that outfit.
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These cars perform well; the slightly dowdy interiors wear well and the seat mechanisms have proved robust.
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She looked dowdy and plain in that outfit.
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Later, she is presented as a rather dowdy vestal virgin or as an elegant but staid matron demurely working on her embroidery.
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What looks "slouchy" according to the fashion magazines' description, always on skinny 17-year-old models with slender skirts and no derriere, just looks messy and dowdy on me.
What Not To Carry
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Although the plants are dowdy looking and scentless during the day, at dusk they suddenly release a powerful ravishing scent.
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Far from being a dowdy matron, she was a strong-willed, independent-minded, intelligent woman, twice married, with a mischievous sense of humour.
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I admit to initially noticing her because she was kind of dowdy I was in a Starbucks of upscale clientele.
The Adventure of TechieGirl
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Thank God for this! we hold no truce with dirt at Singholm; we bid dowdyism begone! avaunt!
London's Underworld
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Our living room does not have any character, unless that character is a dowdy matron who has a full-time gig as a toy tester.
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On the cover of Time, in a spread in Life, the image of Romania's Iron Lady was stout and unsmiling, a monolith with a face of stone, dowdy clothes and unkempt hair.
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In 1905, Elbert Hubbard wrote in the Leavenworth Times of Kansas that ‘The girls at a Fred Harvey place never look dowdy, frowsy, tired, slipshod or overworked.’
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This look tells you two things: that cardigans are no longer dowdy and that pinstripe pyjama pants are strong for another season.
Times, Sunday Times
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And before you got to the former marshlands, several suburbs comprised of nothing but two-dollar shops, dowdy brick semi-detacheds and dozens of gawking fresh air watchers had to be negotiated.
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There is the same comic contrast between the characters' unbridled enthusiasm and their dowdy clothing and heavy Eastern European accents.
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After all those years of boring white coats for doctors and dowdy gowns for patients, finally the medical label is meeting the fashion label.
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There are mallards galore, the males with their metallic green heads and the females a dowdy brown, and busy little black scaups, bobbing like bath toys.
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Charlotte, the Yale graduate in her unflattering woollen tank-top is made to feel dowdy and dull by this jabbering Valley girl.
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Later, she is presented as a rather dowdy vestal virgin or as an elegant but staid matron demurely working on her embroidery.
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Unlike dowdy, brown females of the species, male blackbirds possess bright yellow-to-orange beaks and shiny black plumage.
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She looked very plain and dowdy.
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They had been out at General Headquarters, living in dowdy little hotels in Arras ever since October, most of them.
The Blitzkrieg In Flanders
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What we want here is a good, safe, sane, middle-of-the-road man, with a nice, dowdy wife who wears hats.
THE DISPOSAL OF THE LIVING
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The betting industry needs to shake off its dowdy appearance and attract customers who will still be customers in the 21st century.
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By the end of Ann's episode, the formerly dowdy Jersey girl is certainly more stylish.
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Activism is perhaps no longer as universally linked to an image alternately dowdy and transgressive as it once was, maybe a generation ago, and this delinking is a positive development.
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I think they come hand in hand; dowdy clothes don't make for a good day.
Times, Sunday Times
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Her clothes were wrong, too citified, too dowdy for this brightly flowered, low-cut, strapless crowd.
BLACKWATER SOUND
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Far from being a dowdy matron, she was a strong-willed, independent-minded, intelligent woman, twice married, with a mischievous sense of humour.
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Once you get to a size 14 you find that most swimwear in the shops is dowdy and frumpy.
The Sun
