A person, often a child, who looks cheerfully disheveled or ragged, dressed in tatters, sometimes with an air of spirited mischief. Ragamuffin is less about wandering than about visible scruffiness, as if poverty or play has frayed the hems.

From Middle English, likely from a now-obscure proper name or nickname used for a shabby fellow, later generalized into a type. It has always sounded like its subject: rumpled, lively, impossible to press flat.