The word 'tousle' is correct and usable in written English.
It is a verb meaning to make something, typically hair or clothing, untidy or disheveled. It can also mean to rough up or tousle someone's hair as a playful gesture. Example: She tousled her daughter's hair affectionately before leaving for work.
Boris Johnson is working the crowd in front of an Ealing hairdresser's shop, apparently unaware that the sign above his trademark tousle reads Sheer Hair.
He bent down to tousle the hair of some small boys.
Cypresses have one direction, up, but sometimes desert zephyrs tousle one so that a branch or two will stick straight out — a hatchling fallen from the nest, a broken leg a limp will not forget, a lock of cowlicked hair that spurns the comb.
They trot from sofa to sofa, perch on laps, tousle hair, brush hands away, and wait for tips that are not forthcoming.
He was likely to tousle Philip's hair and tease him the way you'd tease a younger child.
So I was grateful to Sassoon for inventing the Greek Goddess perm — a tousle of wayward curls inspired by the Afros he saw on the streets of Harlem.
Senussi is 62, stocky and tousle-haired, and was sporting an unfamiliar bushy beard when he was flown to Tripoli on Wednesday.
It must have been a seminal moment, that emotional farewell from beloved grandparents – Mum was the youngest, Dad an only child – but I see only the photograph of me taken the night before: a single, black-and-white snapshot of a dark, tousle-haired toddler, sleeping with her arms around a much-loved and worn toy dog.
His image of tousle-haired disorganisation is not merely a pose.
These supporters, some in bow-ties and many waving American flags, now follow the tousle-haired Mr Paul around the country (in Kentucky your correspondent encountered one who had travelled from Wisconsin in the hope of giving him a 150-year-old book).In this section A contest, or a coronation?
The next, every publisher worth his salt was bringing out books about tousle-headed children growing up in Africa as part of a menagerie of orphaned baby animals: bushbabies, warthogs and dwarf mongeese inevitably named after Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.One couple who epitomised this Edenic life was David and Daphne Sheldrick.
