elbowy
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Forms: form: more elbowy
form: most elbowy
Etymology: From elbow + -y.
Senses: examples: text: 1892, Ambrose Bierce, “A Society Leader” in Black Beetles in Amber, San Francisco: Western Authors Publishing Company, p. 85,
Doubtless it gratifies you to observe
Elbowy girls and adipose mamas
All looking adoration as you swerve
This way and that;
text: Flora, rather freckly, elbowy, and far too tall, was none the less about to be pretty.
ref: 1921, Fannie Hurst, chapter 6, in Star-Dust, New York: Harper, page 34:
text: Where I was big, elbowy and grating, he was small, graceful and smooth.
ref: 1969, Maya Angelou, chapter 4, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, New York: Bantam, published 1971, page 17:
text: He is a tall man with shaggy hair and bad teeth, in a suit too big for his sharp, elbowy frame.
ref: 2008, Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures, New York: Schwartz & Wade, page 9:
glosses: Tall and awkward. (of a person’s body)
examples: text: […] I was noticing how very elbowy his gestures were […]
ref: 1919, Tony Cyriax, chapter 17, in Among Italian Peasants, London: W. Collins & Sons, page 254:
text: She squirted in some liquid soap with an elbowy throwing motion.
ref: 1992, Walter Kirn, chapter 5, in She Needed Me, New York: Pocket Books, page 43:
text: I looked for Becker and his buddies—and there they were. Twenty yards away, moving through the crowd in an awkward, elbowy, distinctly non-New York way.
ref: 2000, Gregory Fallis, “Comes the Revolution”, in Abigail Browning, editor, Burder is No Mitzvah, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, published 2004, page 52:
text: “Well, you better like it,” she said, hiking up her red-and-white hosiery with an indelicate, elbowy gesture that reminded Sara of a football coach.
ref: 2003, Daniel Coyle, chapter 1, in Waking Samuel, New York: Bloomsbury, published 2004, page 11:
glosses: Awkward; especially, involving the awkward protrusion of the elbows. (of a person’s movement)
examples: text: 1928, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, diary entry dated 3 May, 1928, in Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928, New York: Signet, 1973, p. 139,
I […] looked out over my garden: the unkempt lush grass and the sweet-gum tree with elbowy boughs, crotchety and irregular.
text: […] he looked up and saw that one of the elbowy dead trees was grimed with vultures.
ref: 1959, Bernard Wolfe, chapter 9, in The Great Prince Died, New York: Scribner, page 121:
glosses: Having bends that resemble elbows. (of a tree or branches)
examples: text: It is a place fit for a lady of her quality, and none of your elbowy dwellings like these crowded about us. One may easily tell the house, by its pretty blinds and its shades.
ref: 1827, James Fenimore Cooper, chapter 8, in The Red Rover, volume I, London: Henry Colburn, page 224:
text: The town (Abingdon) is a tumbled-up, elbowy, crooked old place, with the houses all frowning at each other across the gutters, and the streets narrow and intricate.
ref: 1854, Nathaniel Parker Willis, “Letters from England and the Continent in 1845-’46”, in Famous Persons and Places, New York: Scribner, Letter III, p. 354:
glosses: Angular in an awkward way. (of a built structure)
Synonyms: sense: tall and awkward
word: gangly