Word.ws English Dictionary

gashly

gashly adjective: ghastly, horrible.

Adjective

gashly (comparative more gashly, superlative most gashly)

  1. Ghastly, horrible.
    • My ladies' maid, who was troubled with nerves, declared she could never sleep alone in such a "gashly, rummaging old building;" and the footman, who was a kind-hearted young fellow, did all in his power to cheer her up.1824, Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveller
    • I have a great mind to break all your gashly images about the head of your fine Miss, in her silks and satins;’—mistaking his lay-figure for a living model of the highest sort.1828, JT Smith, Nollekens and His Times, Century Hutchinson, published 1986, page 243

Examples of gashly in a sentence

  • Come in, Huck, but doan' look at his face--it's too gashly."1884 December 10, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter IX, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: (Tom Sawyer’s...
  • Listen here, Swing, old-timer, I got a long and gashly tale of wickedness to pour into those lily-white mule ears of yores.1921, William Patterson White, The Heart of the Range:

Forms of gashly

comparativemore gashly
superlativemost gashly

Origin of gashly

Perhaps a dialectal alteration of ghastly, by association with gash.

Questions about gashly

What does gashly mean?
Gashly means ghastly, horrible.
How do you use gashly in a sentence?
Come in, Huck, but doan' look at his face--it's too gashly."
What part of speech is gashly?
Gashly is an adjective.

Words near gashly in the dictionary

  1. Gashgai
  2. Gashi
  3. gashing
  4. gashings
  5. Gashis
  6. gashly
  7. gasholder
  8. gasholders
  9. gashouse
  10. gashouse egg
  11. gashouse eggs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gashly (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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