down at heel

• down at heels, down at the heel, down at the heels, down in the heel, down in the heels

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

down at heel (comparative more down at heel, superlative most down at heel)

1. (literally, of footwear) In poor condition, especially due to having worn heels; worn-out, shabby.
   • 1836 March – 1837 October, Charles Dickens, chapter 41, in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1837, →OCLC:

     A pair of Oxford-mixture trousers […] fell in a series of not the most graceful folds over a pair of shoes sufficiently down at heel to display a pair of very soiled white stockings.

2. (idiomatic, by extension) Shabbily dressed, slovenly; impoverished; shabby, dilapidated.

   Antonym: well-heeled

   • 1916, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, “John”, in Twilight in Italy, London: Duckworth and Co. […], →OCLC, pages 211–212:

     He was a queer shoot, again, in his unkempt longish hair and slovenly clothes, a sort of very vulgar down-at-heel American in appearance.

   • 1932, Delos W. Lovelace, King Kong, published 1965, page 1:

     For the likes of her, the down-at-heels support of Hoboken pier was plenty good enough.

   • 2003, Lynda Lee-Potter, "Sex-crazed fans . . .," Daily Mail (UK), 27 Dec. (retrieved 20 Jan. 2010):

     Last year, he was down at heel, homeless and had an erratic relationship with his family.

   • 2015 March 31, Margalit Fox, “Gary Dahl, Inventor of the Pet Rock, Dies at 78”, in The New York Times‎^[1], →ISSN:

     A down-at-the-heels advertising copywriter when he hit on the idea, he originally meant it as a joke.

   • 2020, Noreena Hertz, The Lonely Century, Hodder & Stoughton, →ISBN:

     Researchers analysed 500 interviews with people in right-wing strongholds in France and Germany, places such as Gelsenkirchen-Ost, a down-at-heel suburb north-east of Essen blighted with high levels of unemployment and where anti-immigrant party Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) garnered nearly a third of the vote in the 2017 elections […]