1768, (w), (w), "The Mystery. Paris.", http://www.gutenberg.org/files/804/804-h/804-h.htm
(..) the man (..) was dress’d in a dark drab-colour’d coat, waistcoat, and breeches, which seem’d to have seen some years service:—they were still clean, and there was a little air of frugal propreté throughout him.
1858, (w), (w), "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story," Chapter 2, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17780/pg17780-images.html
The coffee presently appeared, brought not as usual by the footman, in scarlet and drab, but by the old butler, in threadbare but well-brushed black (..)
1914, (w), "The Steam Shovel," lines 29-35,http://www.bartleby.com/265/371.html
Have you no longing ever to be free?
In warm, electric days to run a-muck,
Ranging like some mad dinosaur,
Your fiery heart at war
With this strange world, the city’s restless ruck,
Where all drab things that toil, save you alone,
Have life;
1920, (w), "The Sins of Kalamazoo" in Smoke and Steel, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., p. 49, https://archive.org/details/smokesteel00sandiala
The sins of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.
The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab.
And the people who sin the sins of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.
They run to drabs and grays—and some of them sing they shall be washed whiter than snow—and some: We should worry.
1944, (w), (w), "Sounds and Silences," http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100121h.html
Furniture is comical. It responds to humans. For some it looks its drabbest, for others it sparkles and looks, if not handsome, at any rate comfortable.
Old provincial society had ... its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment ....
1956, (w), Gideons Week'':
The doss house emptied during the day; from ten o'clock until five or six in the evening, there was no one there except Mulliver, a drab who did some of the cleaning for him, and occasional visitors.
c. 1602, (w), (w), Act II, Scene 1, http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=hamlet&Scope=entire&pleasewait=1&msg=pl
Ay, or drinking, fencing, swearing, quarrelling,
Drabbing. You may go so far.
(quote-book)
1923, (w), (w), Volume 65, p. 457,
(..) to ask us to subject our souls to its ruinous glamour, to worship it, deify it, and imply that it alone makes our life worth living, is nothing but folly gone mad erotically – a thing compared to which Falstaff's unbeglamoured drinking and drabbing is respectable and rightminded.