Word.ws English Dictionary

knee-jerkishly

knee-jerkishly adverb: in a knee-jerkish manner.

Adverb

knee-jerkishly (comparative more knee-jerkishly, superlative most knee-jerkishly)

  1. (informal) In a knee-jerkish manner.
    • Measurement specialists have been touting the importance of validity and reliability for so many years that most educators, when asked about how to judge a test's quality, will almost knee-jerkishly respond that validity and reliability are at the top of the test-evaluation list.2000, W. James Popham, Modern Educational Measurement: Practical Guidelines for Educational Leaders, Allyn and Bacon, →ISBN, page 66
    • Spotting these new meanings takes a more sophisticated approach to language, and one that is more sensitized to shades of definition instead of just knee-jerkishly categorizing a new meaning as "wrong."2006, Erin McKean, editor, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 264

Forms of knee-jerkishly

comparativemore knee-jerkishly
superlativemost knee-jerkishly

Origin of knee-jerkishly

From knee-jerkish + -ly.

Questions about knee-jerkishly

What does knee-jerkishly mean?
Knee-jerkishly means in a knee-jerkish manner.
What part of speech is knee-jerkishly?
Knee-jerkishly is an adverb.

Words near knee-jerkishly in the dictionary

  1. knee-jerk reaction
  2. knee-jerk reactions
  3. knee-jerkery
  4. knee-jerking
  5. knee-jerkish
  6. knee-jerkishly
  7. knee-jerkism
  8. knee-jerks
  9. knee-jerky
  10. knee-length
  11. knee-pad

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: knee-jerkishly (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “knee-jerkishly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/knee-jerkishly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.