Word.ws English Dictionary

grandfatherly

grandfatherly adjective: of or characteristic of grandfathers.

Adjective

grandfatherly (comparative more grandfatherly, superlative most grandfatherly)

  1. Of or characteristic of grandfathers.
    • [...] with grandfatherly pride he showed pictures of his grandchildren to visitors.1965, From My Life, page 435
  2. Resembling a grandfather.
    • No one among the 25 wealthiest avoided as much tax as Buffett, the grandfatherly centibillionaire.2021 June 8, Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen, Paul Kiel, “The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax”, in ProPublica, archived from the...

Forms of grandfatherly

comparativemore grandfatherly
superlativemost grandfatherly

Origin of grandfatherly

From grandfather + -ly (adjectival suffix).

Words formed from grandfatherly

Questions about grandfatherly

What does grandfatherly mean?
Grandfatherly means of or characteristic of grandfathers.
What part of speech is grandfatherly?
Grandfatherly is an adjective.

Words near grandfatherly in the dictionary

  1. grandfatherish
  2. grandfatherism
  3. grandfatherless
  4. grandfatherlessness
  5. grandfatherliness
  6. grandfatherly
  7. grandfathers
  8. grandfathers in
  9. grandfathers-in-law
  10. grandfathership
  11. grandfer

Source and license

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