scrabbly

Characterised by scrabbling, or digging around.

Once they were young and little and rather "scrabbly." They were given to loud laughter, to whispers, to scribbling pictures, and to mischievous glances.

With their carapace they survive the ordeal of the nets, frisking into scrabbly action as soon as they can.

Covered in loose rocks or crumbling soil.

My mount struggled up the last few feet of scrabbly rock.

She listened hard while she took the horse there but its hooves plodding across the scrabbly hard clay ground drowned out all other sounds.

Difficult to negotiate; requiring scrambling.

The button was a bit awkward for some people's thumbs - big, beefy thumbs found it on the small side, while long, elegant nails found it rather scrabbly.

The trail from Hannegan Peak down to Hannegan Pass is steep, scrabbly, and not maintained.

Scribbly.

The lines of the devices were very scrabbly, and the blue was muddy, and the red was a streaky pink, and Eddy looked very doubtfully at them;

I'm not such a very good hand at readin', and this here's such a scrabbly hand.

Thrown together; disorganized or slapdash.

After a rather scrabbly lunch, eaten with all the children sprawling over the table — they are brick red in colour and have tight rings of black hair and beady eyes — I walked out with my host and hostess in the rain...

He had to learn to climb a ship's rigging; spend many hours aloft, sometimes in bad weather; scrub decks; risk his life chasing whales; eat scrabbly food; sleep in a dank, crowded forecastle.

Characterized by unusual letters (those that have a high score in the game Scrabble).

Amy Reynaldo, the Crossword Fiend blogger, labels the richest alphabetical specimens as Scrabbly, an adjective I'm happy to spread.

The Scrabbliest of the Scrabbly