[see the senses.]
1. Of legs: Curved laterally with the concavity inward. [perh. attrib. use of BANDY sb.1 ‘hockey-stick.’] Also used briefly for bandy-legged.
1687. Shadwell, Juvenal, x. 441. No Noble Youth with Bandy-leggs.
1727. Swift, Wom. Mind, Wks. 1755, IV. I. 85. Nor makes a scruple to expose Your bandy leg, or crooked nose.
1783–94. Blake, Songs Innoc., Little Vagab., 12. Dame Lurch … Would not have bandy children.
1815. Scott, Guy M., xxix. A little mongrel cur, with bandy legs.
Hence Bandy-legged a.
1688. Lond. Gaz., No. 2392/4. A bandy-leged splafooted elderly Man.
1849. W. Irving, Crayon Misc., 233. Short and bandy-legged … his little legs curving like a pair of parentheses below his kilt.
2. Marked with bands; cf. BAND sb.2 10 b. [f. BAND sb.2 + -Y1.]
1552. Act 5–6 Edw. VI., vi. § 27. Cloth … either pursie, bandie, squally by warpe or woufe.
1601. Act 43 Eliz., x. § 1. Clothes … squally, cockling, bandy, light and notably faulty.
3. Full of bands. [f. BAND sb.3 4 + -Y1.]
1852. Dickens, Lett., I. 279. Not quite a place to my taste, being too bandy (I mean musical, no reference to its legs).
