Word.ws English Dictionary

elbowy

elbowy adjective: tall and awkward. (of a person’s body).

Adjective

elbowy (comparative more elbowy, superlative most elbowy)

  1. Tall and awkward. (of a person’s body)
    • Doubtless it gratifies you to observe
      Elbowy girls and adipose mamas
      All looking adoration as you swerve
      This way and that;1892, Ambrose Bierce, “A Society Leader” in Black Beetles in Amber, San Francisco: Western Authors Publishing Company, p. 85
    • Flora, rather freckly, elbowy, and far too tall, was none the less about to be pretty.1921, Fannie Hurst, chapter 6, in Star-Dust, New York: Harper, page 34
    Synonyms:
    gangly
  2. Awkward; especially, involving the awkward protrusion of the elbows. (of a person’s movement)
    • […] I was noticing how very elbowy his gestures were […]1919, Tony Cyriax, chapter 17, in Among Italian Peasants, London: W. Collins & Sons, page 254
    • She squirted in some liquid soap with an elbowy throwing motion.1992, Walter Kirn, chapter 5, in She Needed Me, New York: Pocket Books, page 43
  3. Having bends that resemble elbows. (of a tree or branches)
    • I […] looked out over my garden: the unkempt lush grass and the sweet-gum tree with elbowy boughs, crotchety and irregular.1928, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, diary entry dated 3 May, 1928, in Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928, New York: Signet, 1973, p. 139
    • […] he looked up and saw that one of the elbowy dead trees was grimed with vultures.1959, Bernard Wolfe, chapter 9, in The Great Prince Died, New York: Scribner, page 121
  4. Angular in an awkward way. (of a built structure)
    • It is a place fit for a lady of her quality, and none of your elbowy dwellings like these crowded about us. One may easily tell the house, by its pretty blinds and its shades.1827, James Fenimore Cooper, chapter 8, in The Red Rover, volume I, London: Henry Colburn, page 224
    • The town (Abingdon) is a tumbled-up, elbowy, crooked old place, with the houses all frowning at each other across the gutters, and the streets narrow and intricate.1854, Nathaniel Parker Willis, “Letters from England and the Continent in 1845-’46”, in Famous Persons and Places, New York: Scribner, Letter III, p. 354

Examples of elbowy in a sentence

  • Where I was big, elbowy and grating, he was small, graceful and smooth.1969, Maya Angelou, chapter 4, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, New York: Bantam, published 1971, page 17:
  • He is a tall man with shaggy hair and bad teeth, in a suit too big for his sharp, elbowy frame.2008, Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures, New York: Schwartz & Wade, page 9:
  • Twenty yards away, moving through the crowd in an awkward, elbowy, distinctly non-New York way.2000, Gregory Fallis, “Comes the Revolution”, in Abigail Browning, editor, Burder is No Mitzvah, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, published...
  • “Well, you better like it,” she said, hiking up her red-and-white hosiery with an indelicate, elbowy gesture that reminded Sara of a football coach.2003, Daniel Coyle, chapter 1, in Waking Samuel, New York: Bloomsbury, published 2004, page 11:

Synonyms of elbowy

Forms of elbowy

comparativemore elbowy
superlativemost elbowy

Origin of elbowy

From elbow + -y.

Questions about elbowy

What does elbowy mean?
Elbowy means tall and awkward. (of a person’s body).
How do you use elbowy in a sentence?
Where I was big, elbowy and grating, he was small, graceful and smooth.
What part of speech is elbowy?
Elbowy is an adjective.

Words near elbowy in the dictionary

  1. elbowless
  2. elbowlike
  3. elbowroom
  4. elbows
  5. elbows up
  6. elbowy
  7. Elbrus
  8. Elburg
  9. Elburton
  10. Elburz
  11. ELBW

Source and license

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