Word.ws English Dictionary

chieftainly

chieftainly adjective: befitting a chieftain.

Adjective

chieftainly (comparative more chieftainly, superlative most chieftainly)

  1. Befitting a chieftain.
    • But anyway, if healthy minds in healthy bodies was a New England requirement then, at least chieftainly Hawaiians, though frequently corpulent, were impressively fit.2015 August 26, Jan Morris, “‘Paradise of the Pacific,’ by Susanna Moore”, in New York Times

Forms of chieftainly

comparativemore chieftainly
superlativemost chieftainly

Origin of chieftainly

From chieftain + -ly. Piecewise doublet of captainly.

Questions about chieftainly

What does chieftainly mean?
Chieftainly means befitting a chieftain.
What part of speech is chieftainly?
Chieftainly is an adjective.

Words near chieftainly in the dictionary

  1. chieftaincy
  2. chieftaindom
  3. chieftaindoms
  4. chieftainess
  5. chieftainesses
  6. chieftainly
  7. chieftainries
  8. chieftainry
  9. chieftains
  10. chieftainship
  11. chieftainships

Source and license

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