motherlily
motherlily adverb: in a motherly manner.
Adverb
motherlily (comparative more motherlily, superlative most motherlily)
- In a motherly manner.
- Why do I feel the need to add a second "-ly" to adjectives already ending in "-ly" when abverbializing them? […] "Don't worry about it," she reassured him motherlily.2005 October 29, PR, “Lily Mad”, in alt.usage.english (Usenet), archived from the original on 07 Oct 2025
- For a long minute they embraced, as though mother and child, each needing the other. Moneeq, now down on one knee, looked Nick motherlily in the eye.2006 April 27, Dennis Glawe, chapter 43, in Gifts from Decorah Laurah, Bloomington, Ind.; Central Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire: AuthorHouse, →ISBN, part 17 (Seeking Treasure), page 570
- Synonyms:
- motherly, maternally
Examples of motherlily in a sentence
- He notices that the more orthodoxly mother-type person next to him is not beaming motherlily.2008, Denis Beckett, “Explaining prawns”, in Magenta, Scottsville, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press; Johannesburg: Saga...
- The adjectival suffix -ly, which attaches to person nouns, does not generally allow a subsequent -ly: *gentlemanlily, *motherlily, *neighbourlily, *womanlily.[2013, Laurie Bauer, Rochelle Lieber, Ingo Plag, “The suffix -ly”, in The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (Oxford...
- “Yes squishy Josh, it will,” she motherlily soothed me.2021, Josh Carrott, “Qingdao”, in Once upon a Time in Carrotland: My YouTube Autobiography Which I Definitely Wrote All Of, [Portsmouth...
Synonyms of motherlily
Forms of motherlily
| comparative | more motherlily |
|---|---|
| superlative | most motherlily |
Origin of motherlily
From motherly + -ly.
Questions about motherlily
- What does motherlily mean?
- Motherlily means in a motherly manner.
- How do you use motherlily in a sentence?
- He notices that the more orthodoxly mother-type person next to him is not beaming motherlily.
- What part of speech is motherlily?
- Motherlily is an adverb.
Words near motherlily in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: motherlily (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: “motherlily.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/motherlily. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.