seamy

Coming of age in this seamy milieu has given him a cynical worldview and a preternatural calm.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 14, 2026

Working with cinematographer Robby Müller, Friedkin puts a Los Angeles on screen that is equal parts glamorous and seamy, where even the palm tree in the movie’s logo looks like a gunshot wound.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 18, 2023

There’s no seamy underside to these works, which are both elegant and modern, as if there is no contradiction between the two ideas.

From Washington Post ● Jan. 5, 2023

The seamy district of Moldovanka, filled with low-slung buildings and small factories, was to the Jewish community of Odesa what the Lower East Side once was to New York’s Jews.

From New York Times ● Aug. 19, 2022

Weaving through rush-hour traffic on Turtle's bike, Theo trailed the bus to a seamy downtown district across the railroad tracks where Crow and Otis got off.

From "The Westing Game" by Ellen Raskin

A former private detective, Hammett grounded his narrative in a corrupt Montana mining town, replacing the cozy murders of traditional whodunits with a seamier view of vice.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 19, 2026

“Hightown” captures a seamier side of life in this vacation paradise.

From Washington Post ● Jun. 16, 2020

Afterward, Day seemed uneasy at having exposed so much and ill at ease on the publicity trail; she was snarky to Barbara Walters for pressing her on some of the seamier details in the book.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 13, 2019

Actresses keep fleeing the genteel personas the show saddled them with, finding refuge in seamier characters.

From New York Times ● May 19, 2017

Out of the uttermost end of things     On the side of life that is seamier,   There lies a land, so its poet sings,     Whose people call it Bohemia.

From The Hippodrome by Rachel Hayward

Those places can harbor the ugliest feelings and seamiest beliefs, yet go undetected if a person speaks and acts otherwise.

From Washington Times ● May 18, 2016

But he imbues even his most marginalized characters with strength, dignity and even wisdom as they boldly navigate the Dream Factory’s seamiest underbelly on their own self-possessed terms.

From Washington Post ● Jul. 15, 2015

By The seamiest affair in Washington this summer, one of the seamiest in many summers, is the aborted appointment of Brett McGurk as ambassador to Iraq—but not for the reason many think.

From Slate ● Jun. 20, 2012

But Season 3 of “The Wire” proved that it was also possible to find suspense and meaning in the seamiest margins of city council meetings and municipal elections.

From New York Times ● Oct. 20, 2011

To inquire why the bare mention of the mother of a man's wife should excite merriment is to find oneself instantly deep in sociology—and in some of its seamiest strata too.

From Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 by Sir Owen Seaman