How to Use tatty in a Sentence

tatty

adjective
  • The donor car for this process was quite tatty when it was located.
    — Brett Berk, Car and Driver, 7 Nov. 2022
  • The carpets were tatty; the meeting rooms were ill-equipped.
    — Sam Knight, New Yorker, 25 Aug. 2025
  • All the walls were painted the same dull white, and there were only a few tatty posters for decoration.
    — Alex Marshall, New York Times, 17 Nov. 2022
  • Cash is still printed regularly, because torn and tatty notes need to be replaced.
    — The Week Uk, theweek, 3 Aug. 2024
  • The company turned its tatty icons like Mickey Mouse into cash cows.
    — Ben Smith, New York Times, 11 Apr. 2020
  • Reiko Huffman’s scenic design re-creates well the tatty motel where King spent his last night.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 29 Apr. 2021
  • This is no time for Democrats to be small, tatty and cheap, to do the old class warfare, to issue one-liners instead of thoughts.
    — Peggy Noonan, WSJ, 28 Sep. 2017
  • Cases are heard in tatty courtrooms with computer systems that often fail.
    — The Economist, 22 June 2019
  • Look closely, and the beggar’s left hand has disappeared, tucked inside the placket of his tatty jacket.
    — Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, 31 July 2023
  • Orwell typed for hours upstairs, sitting on his iron bedstead in a tatty dressing gown, chain-smoking shag tobacco.
    — Stephen Metcalf, The Atlantic, 5 Apr. 2024
  • Her only access to fashion as a child was through tatty German mail-order catalogs.
    — Elizabeth Paton, New York Times, 14 Aug. 2019
  • Sitting alone in the dock wearing a tatty orange jump suit, James Ricketson turns around to give the press in the courtroom a wearied shrug.
    — Eli Meixler / Phnom Penh, Time, 15 June 2018
  • The final page of the book shows him being pursued by Bambolona, the baker’s friendly but plain-faced daughter, who hands him a tatty bunch of flowers.
    — Naomi Fry, The New Yorker, 6 Apr. 2020
  • Mayor Eddie DeLoach says — and its historic downtown, which once evinced a tatty charm, has been burnished to a high gloss.
    — Richard Fausset, New York Times, 28 Apr. 2018
  • Callum’s mule is based on a tatty 1999 Mini 40th special edition.
    — Tim Pitt, Robb Report, 10 Mar. 2026
  • Perhaps irony, like water for the swimming pool, is a resource that dries up seasonally in these parts, leaving only a dust bowl of surly resentment and some tatty deckchairs behind.
    — Jessica Kiang, Los Angeles Times, 6 Oct. 2023
  • Her mordant social commentary is lodged between the glamorous fizz of Warhol and the tatty thrift store aesthetic of Mike Kelley.
    — Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, 30 Nov. 2022
  • And the Brits find themselves at a disadvantage when their vaunted national security apparatus proves to be a bit tatty.
    — John Anderson, WSJ, 21 Feb. 2023
  • Slumped in his Beijing hospital bed in tatty ward-issue pajamas, the 69-year-old is a warren of aches and scuffs, and sports a whopping frostbite sore on each of his two cheeks.
    — Charlie Campbell / Beijing, Time, 14 June 2018
  • Now all that remains of his patrimony is enough hefty wood and tatty brocade to churn the stomachs of every Design Within Reach customer in the first three rows.
    — Alexis Soloski, New York Times, 16 Mar. 2017
  • Shacking up in tatty digs on the premises, the men and women who provide daily diversions for the all-inclusive package tourists have the self-organizing camaraderie of a circus troupe.
    — Jessica Kiang, Variety, 17 Aug. 2023
  • Like many of the city’s saloons, Marie’s Crisis, the tatty but venerable West Village piano bar, was closed during the pandemic.
    — Rachel Syme, The New Yorker, 17 July 2021
  • In the center of the room, a ceremonial semi-circle has been set up with a makeshift ring of tatty television monitors playing a selection of Palestine’s video performances from the past 40 years.
    — Christopher Knight, latimes.com, 24 Feb. 2018
  • Science educators were not interested in running a playground that, after 40-plus years, had become physically tatty and obsolete in its predigital presentation.
    — Mark Lamster, Dallas News, 11 Aug. 2021
  • But those concerns often conveniently overlooked the tatty crud regularly published in the country’s reactionary right-wing tabloids, many of which are owned by Murdoch, which have had a profoundly deleterious effect on British society for decades.
    — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 21 June 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tatty.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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