wetly

English

Etymology

From wet +‎ -ly.

Adverb

wetly (comparative more wetly, superlative most wetly)

In a wet manner.
- 1846, Leigh Hunt, “The Journey Through Hell”, in Stories from the Italian Poets‎^[1], volume I, London: Chapman & Hall, page 134:
  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, chapter 4, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, London: Macmillan:
  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.
(UK, informal) Ineffectually, feebly, showing no strength of character.
- 2008 October 29, Michael Billington, “Independent Means”, in The Guardian:
  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 August 27, Terence Blacker, “Fifty years after the satire boom, the country needs it more than ever”, in The Independent:
  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