wetly

English

Etymology

wet +‎ -ly

Adverb

wetly (comparative more wetly, superlative most wetly)

1. In a wet manner.
   • 1846, Leigh Hunt, Stories from the Italian Poets, London: Chapman & Hall, Volume I, “The Journey Through Hell,” p. 134,^[1]

     They lay on one another in heaps, or attempted to crawl about—some itching madly with leprosies—some swollen and gasping with dropsies—some wetly reeking, like hands washed in winter-time.

   • 1916, Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes, The Red Cross Barge, London: Smith, Elder & Co., Part III, Chapter 2, p. 113,^[2]

     On a rickety low cart, drawn by a decrepit pony, was a large wooden packing-case on which some well-meaning hand had drawn, in black paint which still gleamed wetly in the sun, a rude cross.

   • 1961, Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, London: Macmillan, Chapter 4,

     She looked back just as closely through her little eyes, with the near-blackmailing insolence of her knowledge. Whereupon he kissed her long and wetly.

2. (UK, informal) Ineffectually, feebly, showing no strength of character.
   • 2008, Michael Billington, “Independent Means,” The Guardian, 29 October, 2008,^[3]

     Rupert Frazer reveals the hollowness behind the elder Forsyth's tyrannical bluster, while Geoff Breton does all that is possible to reconcile us to his wetly conventional son.

   • 2012, Terence Blacker, “Fifty years after the satire boom, the country needs it more than ever,” The Independent, 27 August, 2012,^[4]

     Hypocrisy is all around us: in supermarkets with their fake green credentials, in a wetly liberal BBC, in publishers now falling over themselves to promote pornography, in a Government that wrings its hands about social problems—sport for children, the erosion of the countryside, gambling, greed—while at the same time busily exploiting and exacerbating them.

Anagrams

• Welty