Word.ws English Dictionary

pointedly

pointedly adverb: explicitly; with emphasis; so as to make a point, especially with criticism.

Adverb

pointedly (comparative more pointedly, superlative most pointedly)

  1. Explicitly; with emphasis; so as to make a point, especially with criticism.
    • The film echoes a central question from all the Wick films, though: is he a natural-born murderer? Or a good man underneath it all? "This is who you are," the Marquis tells him. "A killer." The question is pointedly unresolved here.2023 March 14, Caryn James, “John Wick: Chapter 4: 'Soars above most action films'”, in BBC
    • In a second ruling on Sunday, Immergut expanded on her earlier order, temporarily blocking the administration from deploying troops from any state to Portland, and pointedly questioning an administration attorney over what she characterized as an attempt to circumvent her earlier order.2025 October 6, Michael Williams, “Who is Karin Immergut, the Trump-appointed judge who ruled against his push to deploy troops in Oregon?”, in CNN
  2. (obsolete) Wittily or pithily.
  3. Markedly, intentionally conspicuously.
    • I was pointedly ignored.

Examples of pointedly in a sentence

  • "Guess I'll do some diving from the raft today," I said, pointedly, to Sonny.
  • Metseydi had been drawing increasing crowds with sermons that condemned the government’s religious restrictions, most pointedly on head coverings.
  • In recovering the pointedly Spinozist impulse, the deeper critical motivation behind Heine's seemingly lighthanded poetic playfulness comes to the fore.

All 13 example sentences with pointedly

Forms of pointedly

comparativemore pointedly
superlativemost pointedly

Origin of pointedly

From pointed + -ly.

Questions about pointedly

What does pointedly mean?
Pointedly means explicitly; with emphasis; so as to make a point, especially with criticism.
What part of speech is pointedly?
Pointedly is an adverb.

Words near pointedly in the dictionary

  1. pointed out
  2. pointed Percy at the porcelain
  3. pointed the bone
  4. pointed the finger at
  5. pointed up
  6. pointedly
  7. pointedness
  8. pointednesses
  9. pointee
  10. pointees
  11. pointel

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pointedly (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-pointedly.wav.

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