Word.ws English Dictionary

posily

posily adverb: in an ostentatious and pretentious manner.

Adverb

posily (comparative more posily, superlative most posily)

  1. (colloquial) In an ostentatious and pretentious manner.
    • The waiter posily slops a bit of wine into my glass, and I go through the cringe-making ritual of snorting into it and tasting a bit and saying fine, fine.2003, Kate Cann, Hard Cash, page 140
    • The men keep staring posily out at the audience like disaffected male models; the male-female partner work is jarringly manipulative; the recurrent emphasis on multiple turns, multiple jumps, balances on point, is mere flash.2008 June 13, Alastair Macaulay, “The Cross-Country Currents in American Ballet”, in New York Times

Forms of posily

comparativemore posily
superlativemost posily

Origin of posily

From posey + -ly.

Questions about posily

What does posily mean?
Posily means in an ostentatious and pretentious manner.
What part of speech is posily?
Posily is an adverb.

Words near posily in the dictionary

  1. posies
  2. posiest
  3. posigrade
  4. posigrades
  5. posilutely
  6. posily
  7. posing
  8. posing pouch
  9. posing pouches
  10. posing strap
  11. posing straps

Source and license

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