Word.ws English Dictionary

passive-aggressively

passive-aggressively adverb: in a passive-aggressive manner.

Adverb

passive-aggressively (comparative more passive-aggressively, superlative most passive-aggressively)

  1. In a passive-aggressive manner.
    • [W]ould I like it if I left the dishes in the sink just once, and went into the next room to play my guitar, and Tom sighed all passive-aggressively and banged around the dishes as he sacrificingly cleaned them?2008, Nerissa Nields, “Forgiveness”, in How to Be an Adult: A Musician’s Guide to Navigating Your Twenties, Northampton, Mass.: Mercy House Publishing, →ISBN, part 2 (Taking Care of the Vehicle That...

Forms of passive-aggressively

comparativemore passive-aggressively
superlativemost passive-aggressively

Origin of passive-aggressively

From passive-aggressive + -ly.

Questions about passive-aggressively

What does passive-aggressively mean?
Passive-aggressively means in a passive-aggressive manner.
What part of speech is passive-aggressively?
Passive-aggressively is an adverb.

Words near passive-aggressively in the dictionary

  1. passive voices
  2. passive-aggression
  3. passive-aggressive
  4. passive-aggressive personality disorder
  5. passive-aggressive personality disorders
  6. passive-aggressively
  7. passive-aggressiveness
  8. passive-aggressivist
  9. passive-aggressivists
  10. passive-aggressivity
  11. passive-aggressor

Source and license

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