Citations:dowd

Noun: "(archaic) a dowdy person; a frump"

 * 1912, Edna Ferber, Buttered Side Down, Chapter IX:
 * When the train reached Kewaskum I stepped off into the arms of a dowd in a home-made-made-over-year-before-last suit, and a hat that would have been funny if it hadn't been so pathetic.
 * 1912, David Graham Phillips, The Price She Paid, Chapter V:
 * How would her career be helped by her going about looking a dowd and a frump?
 * 1913, Henry Sydnor Harrison, V. V.'s Eyes, Chapter XI:
 * He, of course, was only an unbalanced religious fanatic, whose opinions were not of the slightest consequence to anybody, whom everybody seemed to take a dislike to at sight (except ignorant paupers like the Cooneys), and whose ideal type of girl would probably be some hideous dowd, a slum-worker, a Salvation Army lassie, perhaps.
 * 1914, Elia W. Peattie, The Precipice, Chapter XXIV:
 * "I shall keep my cloak on while we go down the aisle," she declared. "Nobody notices what one has on when one is safely seated. Particularly," she added, with one of her old-time flashes, "if one's neck is not half bad. Now I'm ready to be fastened, mavourneen. Dear me, it is rather tight, isn't it? But never mind that. Get the hooks together somehow. I'll hold my breath. Now, see, with this scarf about me, I shan't look such a terrible dowd, shall I? Only my gloves are unmistakably shabby and not any too clean, either. George won't let me use gasoline, you know, and it takes both money and thought to get them to the cleaners.
 * 1915, James Branch Cabell, The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck, Chapter II:
 * "You wouldn't have me a dowd, Olaf?" said she, demurely. "I have to be neat and tidy, you know. You wouldn't have me going about in a continuous state of unbuttonedness and black bombazine like Mrs. Rabbet, would you?"
 * 1915, Dorothy Canfield, The Bent Twig, Chapter XIV:
 * They had been brought up from childhood on the tradition of the Marshalls' hopeless queerness, and their collective statement of the Marshalls' position ran somewhat as follows: "The only professors who have anything to do with them are some of the jay young profs from the West, with no families; the funny old La Rues—you know what a hopeless dowd Madame La Rue is—and Professor Kennedy, and though he comes from a swell family he's an awful freak himself.
 * 1915, Edna Ferber, Emma McChesney & Co., Chapter VI:
 * "You all dress so smartly, and I'm such a dowd, I just want to ask you whether you think I ought to get blue, or that new shade of gray for a traveling-suit."
 * 1916, P. C. Wren, Driftwood Spars: The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life, Chapter III:
 * Well--I do not know that a virtuous vulgar dowd is preferable to a wicked winsome witch of refined habits and person, and I should probably have gone quietly on to bankruptcy without any row or rupture, but for Burker.
 * 1917, Honoré Willsie, Lydia of the Pines, Chapter VI:
 * She knew now that she was marked among her mates as a poverty stricken little dowd whom popular boys like Kent and Charlie pitied.
 * 1920, May Edginton, Married Life, or The True Romance, Chapter XVI:
 * Marie was still away upon her trail. "I don't really let myself go as much as you might think. I'm always dressed for breakfast, if I've been up half the night; I don't allow myself to be slovenly. And however I've had to hurry over putting the children to bed, and cooking dinner and things, I always change my blouse and put on my best slippers before Osborn comes in. I feel—at home I feel as if I look quite nice; but when I come out of it"—she indicated her surroundings—"I realise I'm just a dowd who's fast losing what looks she had. When I come out, and see others, I—I know I can't compete. It makes you almost afraid to come out. And Osborn—while I'm at home, plodding along, you see, he's out, seeing the others all the time. He sees them in the restaurants, and they pass him in the street—girls as I used to be."