Word.ws English Dictionary

startlish

startlish adjective: easily startled; skittish.

Adjective

startlish (comparative more startlish, superlative most startlish)

  1. (colloquial) Easily startled; skittish.
    • He stirred up in a kind of a startlish way; but when he see it was only me he took a good gap and stretch, and then he says: “Hello, what's up? Don't cry, bub. What's the trouble?”1884 December 10, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) […], London: Chatto & Windus, […], →OCLC

Forms of startlish

comparativemore startlish
superlativemost startlish

Origin of startlish

From startle + -ish.

Words formed from startlish

Questions about startlish

What does startlish mean?
Startlish means easily startled; skittish.
What part of speech is startlish?
Startlish is an adjective.

Words near startlish in the dictionary

  1. startlines
  2. startling
  3. startlingly
  4. startlingness
  5. startlings
  6. startlish
  7. startlishness
  8. startlist
  9. startlists
  10. startness
  11. startpoint

Source and license

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