Word.ws English Dictionary

painterly

painterly adjective: characteristic of a painter or paintings.

Adjective

painterly (comparative more painterly, superlative most painterly)

  1. Characteristic of a painter or paintings.
    • She always shows and never tells. For some poets, such a concentration on the concrete may imply a loosening of language and of perception, or an immersion into raw emotion. Instead, Becker clothes the everyday in a spare, painterly clarity of perception.1982 August 28, Andrea Loewenstein, “Becker's Experience Talks Back”, in Gay Community News, volume 10, number 7, page 11
  2. Having clear brush-strokes.

Antonyms of painterly

Forms of painterly

comparativemore painterly
superlativemost painterly

Origin of painterly

From painter + -ly.

Words formed from painterly

Questions about painterly

What does painterly mean?
Painterly means characteristic of a painter or paintings.
What part of speech is painterly?
Painterly is an adjective.

Words near painterly in the dictionary

  1. painteries
  2. painterish
  3. painterless
  4. painterlike
  5. painterliness
  6. painterly
  7. painters
  8. paintership
  9. painterships
  10. paintery
  11. paintest

Source and license

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