scrabbly

Once they were young and little and rather "scrabbly." They were given to loud laughter, to whispers, to scribbling pictures, and to mischievous glances.

My mount struggled up the last few feet of scrabbly rock.

The button was a bit awkward for some people's thumbs - big, beefy thumbs found it on the small side, while long, elegant nails found it rather scrabbly.

The lines of the devices were very scrabbly, and the blue was muddy, and the red was a streaky pink, and Eddy looked very doubtfully at them;

After a rather scrabbly lunch, eaten with all the children sprawling over the table — they are brick red in colour and have tight rings of black hair and beady eyes — I walked out with my host and hostess in the rain...

He remembered it well — the scrabbly coloured boats, drawn on to the shingle, painted and chipped with religious legends, the big kerosene lamps, the black nets.

The warm climate must make those qualities grow as abundantly as the vegetation — and all from a scrabbly soil.

We followed a well-worn trail that led across windswept slopes, punctuated with scrabbly vegetation and weathered boulders and dotted with occasional stone-and-mud huts with thatched roofs.

Seen in the darkness, it was that of an evil-looking, thick-set savage, with a forbidding countenance dotted unevenly with scrabbly wisps of beard.

And there was the whole valley spread out down below us, the brown river looking blue and the fields that were so rusty-poor, close up, a fine green from that distance, and even our house with its scrabbly yard looking like a pretty little farm.

The modern mariner who fells his shipmate with a blow of the fist is vastly more interesting a study when he is theoretically one of the highest products of our vaunted civilization than when he is just a scrabbly deck-hand under Drake.

I 'd hate to feel their scrabbly feet, wouldn't you?