disheveled

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 22, 2026 is: disheveled • dih-SHEV-uld  • adjective A disheveled person or thing is not neat or tidy. // His wrinkled suit gave him a disheveled appearance. See the entry > Examples: “My mother is waking up. ... She dresses quickly. Her oblong, Scots-Irish face may be too idiosyncratic for the screen anyway, the hollow cheekbones and sharp eyes, the straw-blond hair worn in a low-slung and slightly disheveled beehive.” — Matthew Specktor, The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood, 2025 Did you know? These days, the adjective disheveled is used to describe almost anything or anyone marked by disorder or disarray. Rumpled clothes, for example, often contribute to a disheveled appearance, as in Colson Whitehead’s novel Crook Manifesto, when the comedian Roscoe Pope walks onstage “disheveled, in wrinkled green corduroy pants.” Apartments, desks, bedsheets, you name it—all can be disheveled when not at their neatest and tidiest. Hair, however, is the most common noun to which disheveled is applied (along with hairdo terms like bun and beard), a fact that makes etymological sense. Disheveled comes from the Middle English adjective discheveled, meaning “bareheaded” or “with disordered hair.” That word is a partial translation of the Anglo-French word deschevelé, a combination of the prefix des- (“dis-“) and chevoil, meaning “hair.”