(a.) Variegated in color; consisting of different colors; dappled; party-colored; as, a motley coat.
(a.) Wearing motley or party-colored clothing. See Motley, n., 1.
(n.) Composed of different or various parts; heterogeneously made or mixed up; discordantly composite; as, motley style.
(n.) A combination of distinct colors; esp., the party-colored cloth, or clothing, worn by the professional fool.
(n.) Hence, a jester, a fool.
Example Sentences:
(1) In the face of the reef’s impending doom a motley collection of ordinary Australians shared a common determination that something had to be done.
(2) The brief sub-section of article 26 could be devastating to efforts to prosecute narcotics gangs, and if it comes into force would undermine the security forces and legal system, according to Kimberley Motley, a lawyer with a practice in Kabul.
(3) When he arrived at the venue and was confronted by a motley horde of fans, tipped off by a tweet, instead of sidling in the back to pace about alone in a corridor, like a normal human would, Fry blithely faced the crowd, chatting and signing autographs.
(4) But few, including the motley coalition of political parties backing him, expect him to give up any power.
(5) It was these motley collections of dreamers and bean-counters who began constructing massive, complex systems for seemingly private communication inside games.
(6) Many said they were there to protest at Ukip's stance on immigration and the political backgrounds of Ukip's motley collection of local council candidates; others were there to protest against his party's obscure economic policies.
(7) I grew up in Europe in the late 1970s and 80s, and remember how the greens were dismissed by the mainstream media and political establishment as nothing more than a motley collection of ex-hippies with no understanding of real-world politics who coalesced around a single issue.
(8) "The law is not just [about] in-court testimony, but it says that witnesses cannot even be questioned, which takes a lot of authority away from the Afghan police, Afghan army, NDS [intelligence agency], and the attorney general's office," said Motley.
(9) No major international bodies are monitoring the vote, but a motley selection of observers from 23 countries have arrived of their own accord.
(10) The Hateful Eight , shot in 70mm and about a motley crew of 19th century bounty hunters and criminals who take refuge in a stagecoach stopover on a mountain pass to shelter from a blizzard, no doubt hopes to make it a hat-trick.
(11) The Good Terrorist (1985) After two short novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers, Lessing returned to publishing under her own name with this story of a well-intentioned revolutionary, Alice, who lives in a north London squat with a motley bunch of fellow militants.
(12) The network’s chair, Tory county councillor Cecilia Motley, complained of a “tsunami of swingeing cuts” that would “make life for hundreds of thousands of people across all areas of rural England totally intolerable.” This angry grassroots reaction from the Tory shires has been awkward for the PM, for whom council cuts, for so long relatively unnoticed, at least among his affluent core support, appear to have become a liability.
(13) He said the committee was a “motley collection of amateurs” who would destroy Ukip.
(14) A motley battalion is trooping the colours in the snowy yard at the Cossack military school near Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), nearly 1,000km south-east of Moscow.
(15) If Kippers are a motley crew of Tory Europhobes, why should the left pay them any mind?
(16) Whether Manafort and the rest of Trump’s motley crew can pull something resembling a platform together ahead of the convention is anyone’s guess.
(17) It is an endless field of tiny wooden and perspex blocks, low-rise courtyards huddled cheek by jowl with a motley jumble of towers, expanding ever outwards in concentric rings.
(18) The motley contents of my baking cupboard – some flour, sugar, a handful of currants and a few crusty tins of syrup – are hardly inspiring, but I've vowed not to leave the house until the weather brightens.
(19) A few weeks later a motley group of radical rightwing European populists turned up in Crimea to watch its hastily arranged “referendum”.
(20) It is worth noting also that the official observers for this sham display of democracy were a motley collection of Putin apologists and – ironically given all the fury over "fascists" in Kiev – members of far-right parties.
Ragtag
Definition:
Example Sentences:
(1) To Popovich's credit, the ragtag group of roleplayers and benchwarmers almost pulled off a victory.
(2) In addition to the huge number of different groups fighting on the Ukrainian side, there is also a ragtag assortment of people fighting for the separatists – a mixture of Cossack militias and others from Russia who may have links with Russian intelligence, people representing local business and criminal interests, and ideologically motivated locals who genuinely believe in the cause.
(3) Based on Robert Edsel's book, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes , the film focuses on the ragtag group of Americans, played by Clooney, Damon, Murray, Goodman and Bob Balaban, one Brit (Hugh Bonneville – Heslov is a big fan of Downton Abbey) and one Frenchman (Jean Dujardin, who is sweet in the film, even if he clearly only understood about one English word in every five of his lines) who were formed to try to save some of the great works of European art and architecture from being destroyed and pillaged during the second world war.
(4) Something is bubbling under the surface and the ragtag platoon of Ukip activists in Somerset say they feel it too.
(5) That’s where the ragtag bunch of 30 volunteers comes in.
(6) In the centre of town, pockets of armed men in ragtag military gear as well as larger groups of unarmed men congregated.
(7) Coke's critics are largely a ragtag bunch but the company has been unable to drown out the background noise, despite an annual marketing budget of $2bn.
(8) Its ragtag forces, including a high proportion of press-ganged and brutalised children, became notorious for abduction, gang rape and summary execution.
(9) This body is populated by a motley collection of amateurs; leftovers from a bygone age, when Ukip was a ragtag band of volunteers on the fringes of British politics.
(10) But for the first time in the quarter-century since global warming became a major public issue the advantage in this struggle has begun to tilt away from the Exxons and the BPs and towards the ragtag and spread-out fossil fuel resistance, which is led by indigenous people, young people, people breathing the impossible air in front-line communities.
(11) At the moment most of the interventions have been against softer targets – Saudi Arabia targeting guerrillas in Yemen; Egypt against Bedouin in Sinai; or strikes against ragtag armies in Libya.
(12) Even with better weapons and more training, they say, the rebels' ragtag forces are unlikely in the short term to be a match for Gaddafi's men.
(13) Clovis, a professor at Morningside College in Sioux City and occasional talk-radio host, has since been supplemented with a ragtag group of foreign policy advisers recently announced by the campaign, as well as by Stephen Miller, a longtime aide to Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who at campaign rallies has accused Cruz of wanting to start a war with Russia.
(14) Now try to imagine for a moment the excitement of the Cuban people in 1959 when the charismatic barbudo, Fidel Castro, and his band of ragtag rebels managed to pull off the impossible: getting rid of the dictator Fulgencio Batista and ushering in – or so everyone expected – a new era in Cuba; a Cuba free of the corruption, violence and cronyism that had pockmarked its history since before its Wars of Independence, and radically divided the haves and the have-nots.
(15) But my fondest memory is of The Brass Band, a ragtag bunch of American players who performed classical music brilliantly and with no reverence at all.
(16) Lea says the Northern Territory’s struggle for political representation stretches back beyond 1978 to the start of the 20th century and a “ragtag bunch of mostly blokes” who fought hard – but that’s not what Territory Day is about today, she says.
(17) It’s beyond a place called Jalbire but we’ve heard trucks are being looted, so the villagers come to a prearranged spot: a ragtag bunch of old men and small boys who are thrilled to receive a few basic necessities – a tarpaulin each, a packet of biscuits, some thin foam to sleep on.
(18) Each features a larger-than-life warlord and ragtag followers kitted out in mix'n'match uniforms.
(19) The ragtag army can fight a war of attrition with the government, but with no leadership and no command structure, they are unable to organise a concentrated attack on its bases.
(20) Here, a ragtag gang of American soldiers (including C Thomas Howell!)