gingerly
Part of speech: adv
adj
Morphological type: derivation
Etymology: The second element is -ly; the first element may be Anglo-Norman gençur or Old French gençor, gensor, comparative forms (also attested as positives) of gent (“beautiful, noble, pleasant, courteous”). The Oxford English Dictionary notes, however, that there is a gap of a few centuries between the last appearance of gençor, etc., and the first appearance of gingerly.
The adjective is derived from the adverb, possibly because -ly is also a suffix forming adjectives.
Affixes: -ly
Inflected forms:
form: more gingerly
pos: adv
tags: comparative
form: most gingerly
pos: adv
tags: superlative
form: more gingerly
pos: adj
tags: comparative
form: gingerlier
pos: adj
tags: comparative
proscribed
rare
form: most gingerly
pos: adj
tags: superlative
form: gingerliest
pos: adj
tags: proscribed
rare
superlative
Senses:
gloss: In a cautious and delicate manner; (very) carefully or cautiously.
pos: adv
examples: He placed the glass jar gingerly on the concrete step.
In an other corner, Mistris Minx, a marchants wife, that will eate no cherries, forsooth, but when they are at twentie shillings a pound, that lookes as simperingly as if she were besmeard, and iets it as gingerly as if she were dancing the canaries, […]
[E]nter you the chambers peaceably, locke the dores gingerly, looke vpon your vviues wofully, but vpon the euill-doers, moſt vvickedly.
Prithee, gentle officer, / Handle me gingerly, or I fall to pieces, / Before I can plead mine.
[…] Sir W. Pen made a formal speech in answer to a question of the King's, whether the lying of the sunk ships in the river would spoil the river. But, Lord! how gingerly he answered it, and with a deal of do that he did not know whether it would be safe as to the enemy to have them taken up, but that doubtless it would be better for the river to have them taken up.
My mother was going very gingerly in the dark along the paſſage which led to the parlour, as my uncle Toby pronounced the word wife.
Then of a sudden the rope was still—the stone had caught at the very edge. Gingerly the ape-man clambered up the frail rope.
Purchasing a snowplow transforms Homer [Simpson] into a new man. Mr. Burns' laziest employee suddenly becomes an ambitious self-starter who buys ad time on local television at 3:17 A.M^([sic]) (prime viewing hours, Homer gingerly volunteers, for everyone from alcoholics to the unemployable to garden-variety angry loners) and makes a homemade commercial costarring his family.
[Martin Luther] King [Jr.] was later said to have been within a sneeze or a jolt of extinction. Were it not for the pair of cops who gingerly carried him from Blumstein’s department store and the pair of surgeons who performed lifesaving surgery at Harlem Hospital there would have been no "I Have a Dream" speech and likely no national holiday honoring him.
When we got there and went to our room he undressed and shut off the light as I was still doing so, and I got into bed gingerly, facing his turned back, and reached out to touch him.
gloss: Chiefly of dancing or walking: done with small, dainty steps; daintily; also, with excessive delicacy; affectedly, mincingly.
pos: adv
tags: obsolete
examples: Oh! ſhe lookes ſo ſugredly, ſo ſimpringly, ſo gingerly, ſo amarouſly, ſo amiably. […] [She] is ſuch an intycing ſhee-vvitch, carrying the charmes of your Ievvels about her. Oh!
gloss: Often of movements: very careful, cautious, or delicate.
pos: adj
examples: We can honestly commend the Atlantic Monthly as the most able and spirited of American periodicals, at the present time, and we like it, moreover, because it dares have opinions and to express them in unmistakable terms, on subjects which when referred to at all, by most of the current magazines, are mentioned in the gingerliest namby-pamby style of common place neutrality.
But, ther's somethin' in the very look and voice of Jeems Strebling, even in his gingerly walk, that riles all the black drop in me.
[P]enetrating cautiously into dark cellars, sallying with gingerly tread to the garden, now leaf-strewn by the autumn winds, […]
During the extra session there were few crimes in the decalogue of which we were not accused, and all because of our old-fashioned tariff views and our quaint, blunt way of expressing them. While this treatment had its toughening effects, none the less did the Landmark’s icy rebuke mortify and silence us. We return to the painful subject in the gingerliest way imaginable, our mood far from affirmative, but interrogatory from first to last.
The down "Atlantic Coast Express", headed by Pacific No. 35020 Bibby Line, passes the scene of operations at a gingerly 10 m.p.h.
Several gingerly taps on her console fired clusters of modified probes into the maelstrom of the gas giant’s atmosphere.
gloss: Often of a person or the way they move: dainty, delicate; also, excessively delicate; affected, mincing.
pos: adj
tags: obsolete
examples: All yᵉ rest of my trimmest, tricksiest, gingerliest ioyes, / But very tædious and most odious toyes?
Related words: gingerish
gingerness
Derived words: ginger
gingerliness
Translations: