Word.ws English Dictionary

sniffingly

sniffingly adverb: with a sniffing sound or action.

Adverb

sniffingly (comparative more sniffingly, superlative most sniffingly)

  1. With a sniffing sound or action.
    • All during the night the riding ponies had grazed in close proximity to the house, had stamped about it, and occasionally had put their noses to its cracks, sniffingly to satisfy either curiosity or a desire for human companionship.1997, Philip Ashton Rollins, The Cowboy, page 191
  2. With haughty disapproval.
    • Philip Hone sniffingly noted in his diary that "they increase our taxes, eat our bread and encumber our streets, and not one in twenty is competent to keep himself."2004, Edward Robb Ellis, The Epic Of New York City: A Narrative History, page 232
    • Mrs. Chow down the street, for instance, why did she look so sniffingly upon him when she heard the children, in the harmless uproar of their play, cry him aloud as Daddy?2007, Christopher Morley, Where the Blue Begins, page 27

Forms of sniffingly

comparativemore sniffingly
superlativemost sniffingly

Origin of sniffingly

From sniffing + -ly.

Questions about sniffingly

What does sniffingly mean?
Sniffingly means with a sniffing sound or action.
What part of speech is sniffingly?
Sniffingly is an adverb.

Words near sniffingly in the dictionary

  1. sniffing position
  2. sniffing positions
  3. sniffing up
  4. sniffing-the-morning-air position
  5. sniffing-the-morning-air positions
  6. sniffingly
  7. sniffings
  8. sniffish
  9. sniffishly
  10. sniffishness
  11. sniffle

Source and license

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