1773 J. Berridge Christian World Unmasked 18 Some are mighty decent characters, like a king and queen of France, others rude and racketty, like cobler Punch and his wife.

1796 S. J. Pratt Gleanings Wales, Holland & Westphalia (ed. 2) xiv. 228 One of my cows, that was afflicted sorely with, as he called it, a racketty complaint in her bowels.

1885 Manch. Examiner 9 Apr. 5/3 The rackety winds of March and April.

1906 Suburbanite Econ. (Chicago) 30 Nov. 6/5 One of those rackety riveting machines began hammering away at top speed.

1953 Musical Times 94 82 The scherzo expresses the joy of the plebs when their lord's castle goes up in flames; and a rackety finale pictures Goose Fair.

1974 C. Milne Enchanted Places xix. 129 A room designed—as a nursery should be—for doing things in, messy things, racketty things, rough-and-tumble things.

2001 People (Nexis) 18 Mar. (Features) 28 He hadn't realised the rackety noise was coming from him.

1787 A. Hughes Caroline I. 98 I know, madam, you are not for such rackety doings.

1798 T. Holcroft He's much to Blame ii i. 21 That my wife Lady Vibrate is an extravagant rackety rantipole woman of fashion, can I doubt that?

1826 W. Hone Every-day Bk. (1827) II. 820 A racketty life had racketted his frame.

1865 Times 26 Aug. 10/6 It is no such racketty place of dissipation as Wiesbaden, Homburg, or other rival establishments.

1884 Amer. Naturalist 18 109 Their boys are all jolly, nice young fellows. All have turned out so well, not one of them rackety, you know.

1929 S. Lewis Dodsworth xi. 86 He had them made members of a rackety night club called ‘The Rigadoon’.

1941 P. Hamilton Hangover Square v. iii. 147 His ‘dead’ moods had been less frequent recently, and he thought this might be because he was drinking less and not leading such a rackety life.

1995 M. L. Settle Choices Prol. i. 7 Aunt Maymay had lived a marvelous rackety life and done, as her mother had said, everything you couldn't talk about.

2007 Guardian 29 Sept. (Review section) 4/4 Rackety young society women such as the morphine addict Brenda Dean Paul and Elizabeth Ponsonby, whose father, the Labour leader of the House of Lords, died of drink on the eve of the blitz.

1824 W. Irving Tales of Traveller I. 55 An old rackety inn, that looked ready to fall to pieces.

1843 Ladies' Repository Mar. 90 Two chairs were immediately set, one with the back broken off, the other rackety and unstable.

1893 Times 14 Nov. 11/2 Sooner or later the time must come when all means of keeping this rackety concern going and of keeping the present Ministry in power would begin to fail.

1944 C. Beaton Diary 19 Apr. in Self Portrait with Friends (1979) xiv. 132 How the others of our party always remain so optimistic about reaching our destination in these two rackety trucks is a continuous source of admiration to me.

a1969 J. Kerouac Visions of Cody (1992) 350 The cracked old crazy John Gaunt from a rackety house in a telegraph grove outside the Bakersfield flats.

1997 P. Melville Ventriloquist's Tale (1998) ii. 186 At the top of the bank stood two rackety sheds with a few old dried palm leaves covering the roofs.