Word.ws English Dictionary

knuckly

knuckly adjective: knucklelike.

Adjective

knuckly (comparative knucklier, superlative knuckliest)

  1. Knucklelike.
    • [N]ow he was skirting a rock face whose crown overhung its base and whose extensive surface was knuckly with the clay nests of innumerable martins; […]1950, Mervyn Peake, chapter 19, in Gormenghast (The Gormenghast Trilogy; II), revised edition, New York, N.Y.: Ballantine Books, published October 1968, →OCLC, page 160
  2. Having prominent knuckles.
    • At the far end of the houses the head gardener stood waiting for his mistress, and he gave her strips of bass to tie up her nosegay. This she did slowly and laboriously, with knuckly old fingers that shook.1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XXXIX, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC, page 307

Forms of knuckly

comparativeknucklier
superlativeknuckliest

Origin of knuckly

From knuckle + -y.

Questions about knuckly

What does knuckly mean?
Knuckly means knucklelike.
What part of speech is knuckly?
Knuckly is an adjective.

Words near knuckly in the dictionary

  1. knuckling
  2. knuckling down
  3. knuckling to
  4. knuckling under
  5. knuckling up
  6. knuckly
  7. knucks
  8. Knud Rasmussen Land
  9. Knudsen
  10. Knudsen flow
  11. Knudsen flows

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: knuckly (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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