Meaning & use
squiggly
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Meaning
adjectivecomparableinformal
Made of small, loose curves and twists, like a line drawn by a shaky hand.
Grammar: Goes before a noun or after be: a squiggly line, the line is squiggly.
Patterns
- a squiggly line
- squiggly handwriting
My word processor put a squiggly red line under the misspelled word.
The toddler covered the page in squiggly lines and called it a dragon.
His signature is just a squiggly mark that nobody can read.
Word forms
| comparative | squigglier |
|---|---|
| superlative | squiggliest |
Common combinations
- squiggly line
- A squiggly line ran across the whole map.
- squiggly underline
- The squiggly underline warned me about a grammar mistake.
- squiggly handwriting
- The doctor's squiggly handwriting was impossible to decode.
- squiggly pattern
- The fabric had a squiggly pattern in blue and white.
Synonyms and how they differ
- wavy
- Wavy is neater and more regular, while squiggly suggests uneven, hasty curves.
- wiggly
- Wiggly stresses a twisting motion or shape, often of a worm or a line, and sounds a little more playful.
- curly
- Curly describes round, repeated curls such as hair, not loose scribbles.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: squiggly or wriggly?
squiggly vs wriggly
Wriggly describes something that moves by twisting, like a child or a worm; squiggly describes a drawn or fixed shape.
Practice
Which word best describes the loose, shaky lines a child scribbles across a page?
Choose one answer.
Squiggly means made of small uneven curves. Angular means having sharp corners, which is the opposite of scribbled curves.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “squiggly”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.