Citations:shipwrecky

Adjective: "characteristic of a shipwreck"

 * 1856 — The Harvard Magazine, Volume II, Number V, June 1856, page 222:
 * Do you think, though, that even an illustrated edition of it would fill him with genuine enthusiasm, — the luscious shipwrecky, Newfoundland-dog, barren-island sort of feeling, — if he bent his callous imagination to the task at twenty-one?
 * 1896 — Elizabeth Westyn Timlow, Cricket at the Seashore, Estes and Lauriat (1896), Chapter VI:
 * "I was only joking. We've escaped from a burning vessel, you know, and every one else is either burned or drowned. We've provisions for a month, if we don't eat too much, and we're in the South Sea Islands. South Sea Islands sound nice and shipwrecky, don't you think so?"
 * 1920 — McClure's Magazine, Volume 52, page 32:
 * Certainly the quaint garnet necklace could hardly have found a more romantic and shipwrecky sort of setting.

Adjective: "(figuratively) weak, feeble; shaky"

 * 1857 — Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays, Chapter V:
 * But down below he is not so good by any means—no spring from the loins, and feeblish, not to say shipwrecky, about the knees.
 * 1903 — Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, Volume 56, page 453:
 * Plupy barely escaped being plucked, as his papers showed him to be weak in arithmetic, shipwrecky in grammar, erratic in spelling, and indictable in geography.
 * 1913 — Woods Hutchinson, Common Diseases, Houghton Mifflin Company (1913), page 189:
 * A few unfortunates there are, both men and horses, who are born with "shipwrecky" nervous systems, and these furnish the worst illustrations of causeless worry, of persistent forebodings, or, with a slightly deeper degree of defect, of shiftlessness, perversity, and even crime.
 * 1954 — Manly Wade Wellman, Dead & Gone: Classic Crimes of North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press (1980), ISBN 0807806668, page 31:
 * She put a hot poultice on the shipwrecky stomach, and sent Whitfield to fetch Dr. Benjamin Robinson.
 * 1985 — Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1985), ISBN 0151271836, page 136:
 * No, the real shipwrecky feeling comes when I get home, to my account book, to the thirty pages of my novel, to Mother's consulation on the next dress,
 * 2007 — Riaan Manser, Around Africa on My Bicycle, Jonathan Ball Publishers (2007), ISBN 9781868422470, page 301:
 * So there I was, standing by the roadside in pitch darkness with my belongings and shipwrecky knees.