Word.ws English Dictionary

afly

afly adjective: flying; moving freely through the air; blown by the wind.

Adjective

afly (not comparable)

  1. Flying; moving freely through the air; blown by the wind.
    • I tell you, Mister, such a family / With a sick husband, keep my hands afly;1895, Josephine Tyler, Ben’s Isabella, Buffalo, NY: Charles Wells Moulton, Canto 12, p. 147
    • Thus, the light switched on, there was Einhorn in his BVDs, wasted arms freckled, grizzled hair afly from his face that was inclined to flatness, the shrewd curved nose and clipped mustache.1953 September 18, Saul Bellow, chapter V, in The Adventures of Augie March […], New York, N.Y.: The Viking Press, →OCLC, pages 64–65

Examples of afly in a sentence

  • Trench coat afly, hair touseled, face pink, although from exertion rather than inebriation.1983, Todd McEwen, chapter 12, in Fisher’s Hornpipe,, New York: Harper & Row, page 198:
  • The sagebrush fire sent orange sparks afly in the star-strewn sky and infused the still air with aromatic smoke.2002, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Light Music, New York: EOS, page 95:

Origin of afly

From a- + fly.

Words formed from afly

Questions about afly

What does afly mean?
Afly means flying; moving freely through the air; blown by the wind.
How do you use afly in a sentence?
Trench coat afly, hair touseled, face pink, although from exertion rather than inebriation.
What part of speech is afly?
Afly is an adjective.

Words near afly in the dictionary

  1. AFLUA
  2. aflush
  3. aflutter
  4. afluzosin
  5. AFLW
  6. afly
  7. AFM
  8. AFMA
  9. AFMs
  10. AFN
  11. AFNs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: afly (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “afly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/afly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.