Word.ws English Dictionary

bookly

bookly adjective: of or pertaining to books; literary.

Adjective

bookly (comparative booklier or more bookly, superlative bookliest or most bookly)

  1. Of or pertaining to books; literary.
    • As you received this and many other bookly treasures, all for the small annual fee of one dollar, […]1919, Flora Warren Seymour, The Step Ladder: Volumes 1-5, Bookfellows
    • But I shall not spoil for anyone the delight of discovering that most bookly of bookly books.1920, George Steele Seymour, Adventures with books and autographs
  2. Learned from books; bookish; by-the-book.
    • He has with him his secretary, who speak the Spanish in a very bookly manner.1932, Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association, Improvement era: Volume 36

Forms of bookly

comparativebooklier
comparativemore bookly
superlativebookliest
superlativemost bookly

Origin of bookly

From Middle English *bocli, from Old English bōclīċ (“of or belonging to a book, scientific, biblical, scriptural”); equivalent to book + -ly. Cognate with Danish boglig (“bookish”), Swedish boklig (“bookish, literary”).

Questions about bookly

What does bookly mean?
Bookly means of or pertaining to books; literary.
What part of speech is bookly?
Bookly is an adjective.

Words near bookly in the dictionary

  1. booklover
  2. booklovers
  3. Booklr
  4. booklung
  5. booklungs
  6. bookly
  7. bookmaker
  8. bookmakers
  9. bookmaking
  10. bookmakings
  11. bookman

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bookly (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: “bookly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bookly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.