[ noun ] disparaging terms for the common people <noun.group>
The Contras' reputation as an unsavory band of ragtag thugs whose troops murdered civilians and kidnapped youths began changing in 1986.
The party congress will be the 13th since a ragtag group of 12 leftist intellectuals, moving their meeting place to a pleasure boat to avoid the police, met in Shanghai in 1921.
In return, Horn gets about half of his flock of 180 shorn for free, although the results are a little ragtag.
Prince William Sound fishermen, who have been using oil booms and a ragtag fleet of loaned equipment to protect vital salmon fisheries, warn the storm and tides could push the oil over their barriers and kill millions of salmon fry.
He remembers bumping into Trotsky in the same year, his black hair tossed by the wind, haranguing ragtag peasants in a suburb of the starving city.
The rebels are a motley, ragtag force who arm and clothe themselves with anything they can capture or steal.
Promoting himself to "general," he raised a ragtag band of 1,000 mercenary cutthroats and led this "army" for six weeks of grueling trekking over 600 miles of desert to capture the Libyan port of Derna.
The few remaining staff members locked the U.S. Embassy's gray steel doors Friday and plan to evacuate before the Red Army leaves the ragtag Afghan army to a showdown with Moslem guerrillas.
It began when a ragtag fleet of 800 naval vessels, barges, fishing boats and pleasure craft rallied to Winston Churchill's call to save the Allied armies from the encircling Wehrmacht.
As the ragtag Continental Army struggled through the brutal winter at Valley Forge, Gen.
At the time, the National Liberation Army, known as the ELN, appeared to be a ragtag band of rebels.
In 1981, it rushed in to prop up a ragtag anti-Sandinista movement without first trying to create a political basis for a counterrevolution against the leftist government in Managua.
Each day, editor in chief Hutchinson Persons deploys a ragtag sales force from his Times Square offices.
Their ragtag forces were nervous and often trigger-happy in the face of desperate professionals fighting for their lives against inevitable criminal prosecution under a reformist government.