The word "shabbiness" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe something that is in poor condition or lacking in elegance or sophistication. Example: "The shabbiness of the old building contrasted sharply with the modern skyscrapers surrounding it." Alternatives include "dilapidation" or "unkemptness."
The internet's erasure of geography lets people have a flutter without having to leave their living-rooms for the Bellagio's bombast or the shabbiness of the local dive (see article).
The bright mimosas and bougainvilleas of Rabat and the bustling business centre of Casablanca form a striking contrast with the dreary shabbiness and laissez-aller encountered elsewhere in the region.
The shabbiness of public transport is pushing people onto crowded roads.
The tourism ministry switched its spending from marketing to improving Bay Street, the main shopping zone in Nassau, worried that its pervasive shabbiness would send the wrong signals.In 1994 Sun International, a company which owns resorts in the Indian Ocean, bought the main hotel-casino and much of the land on Paradise Island (a name changed from Hog Island in an earlier marketing push).
It lit the backs of bindings, pictures, furniture which had reached exactly the right pitch of faded country-house shabbiness, curtains laundered hundreds of times over and music open above the keys of a piano.
No one really knows why it was built, but its peculiar fascination reaches its peak next week, when around 20,000 people will turn up to celebrate the summer solstice.The druids, pagans, astrologers and revellers may be too excited about being let near the stones, which they were banned from up until a few years ago, to care much about the shabbiness of the site.
Parks's keen eye for picturesque decay cannot disguise the poverty that characterises so much of this family's material life, a shabbiness most seek to overcome by carrying themselves in public with superhuman dignity.
In a most beautiful and moving elegy (IV:7), he conjures up her ghost and with it re-creates the whole glamour and shabbiness of the affair.
To combat this, Klein, a self-made man, created a special fund for "youngsters whose poverty and shabbiness shame them before other girls.
The work's material shabbiness and playacting artificiality intensified the effect, roping me into complicity with the artist's intention as efficiently as a halcyon film by Godard.
There must have been a hundred towns like it, set up in the heat of an old urgency that is all forgotten now, and their littleness and their shabbiness, which was the measure of the courage and passion that went into the making of them, now just look awkward and provincial and ridiculous, even to the people who have lived here long enough to know better.
