Word.ws English Dictionary

expectantly

expectantly adverb: in an expectant manner.

Adverb

expectantly (comparative more expectantly, superlative most expectantly)

  1. In an expectant manner.
    • The cat looked expectantly at the mouse.
    • Then came a maid with hand-bag and shawls, and after her a tall young lady.[…]She looked around expectantly, and recognizing Mrs. Cooke's maid[…]Miss Thorn greeted her with a smile which greatly prepossessed us in her favor.1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter V, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC

Examples of expectantly in a sentence

  • His appearance and manner are peculiarly arresting, and as he raised his hand for order the whole audience settled down expectantly to give him a hearing.1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:
  • So he went, uneconomically but expectantly, to the emergency room.2008 January 8, Elissa Ely, M.D., “Homeless, With a New Loss: Identity”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 24 Oct 2015:
  • Larissa felt “pulled” to Rachel, who was standing expectantly on Larissa’s doorstep.2023 August 18, Francesca Street, “Her flight was canceled. Then she ended up on the doorstep of her future wife”, in CNN:

Forms of expectantly

comparativemore expectantly
superlativemost expectantly

Origin of expectantly

From expectant + -ly.

Questions about expectantly

What does expectantly mean?
Expectantly means in an expectant manner.
How do you use expectantly in a sentence?
His appearance and manner are peculiarly arresting, and as he raised his hand for order the whole audience settled down expectantly to give him a hearing.
What part of speech is expectantly?
Expectantly is an adverb.

Words near expectantly in the dictionary

  1. expectance
  2. expectances
  3. expectancies
  4. expectancy
  5. expectant
  6. expectantly
  7. expectants
  8. expectation
  9. Expectation Week
  10. expectational
  11. expectationally

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: expectantly (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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