Scoury

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Showery, marked by intermittent rain showers and wind.

    "'... scoury (tempestuous) night.'"

  2. 2
    Suffering from scouring (diarrhea).

    "... scoury calves sometimes die. As with so many livestock disorders, prevention is the name of the game. At one time every calf I brought on the farm caught a wicked brand of scours. Evidently, previously purchased baby bovines had[…]"

  3. 3
    Shabby.

    "... [the] scoury-looking fellow I saw you speaking to at the bridge-end that day of our Sacrament was one of that kind of folk?"

Example

More examples

"'... scoury (tempestuous) night.'"

Etymology

Etymology 1

From a dialectal sense of scour, "rain shower", from Old Norse skúr (“shower”), + -y.

Etymology 2

From scour (“suffer diarrhea”) + -y.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.