Word.ws English Dictionary

swelly

swelly adjective: tending to bulge or swell. Also the alternative form of swally.

Adjective

swelly (comparative more swelly, superlative most swelly)

  1. (informal) Tending to bulge or swell.
    • He had a nasty face though, the boy considered, and looked like a bounder because he had pimples, a swelly nose, a loud voice, and a swanky manner. The boy disapproved of him wholly.1914, Percival Christopher Wren, “The Sword and the Soul”, in Snake and Sword: A Novel, London; New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co. […], →OCLC, part II (The Searing of a Soul), page 67

Noun

swelly (plural swellies)

  1. (UK, historical) An abnormal local thickening of a seam of coal.
    • Between the two extremes, the line of coast passes through a very great depression of the strata, designated locally a "swelly," and constituting that feature generally met with in coal fields which is properly termed a basin. This greatest depression takes place near the town of Sunderland, where...1863, A History of the Trade and Manufactures of the Tyne, Wear, and Tees
    • Swellies are depressions of seams of coal: the floor and roof dipping into a trough and rising out of it in most cases to such a level as they would have been found to exist, had no disturbance taken place. In such cases the coal in the bottom of the trough or swelly is commonly of unusual...1870, George Clementson Greenwell, A Practical Treatise on Mine Engineering, page 120

Also used as

swelly is also the alternative form of swally.

Forms of swelly

Adjective
comparativemore swelly
superlativemost swelly
Noun
pluralswellies

Origin of swelly

From swell + -y.

Questions about swelly

What does swelly mean?
Swelly means tending to bulge or swell.
What part of speech is swelly?
Swelly can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near swelly in the dictionary

  1. swells up
  2. swellshark
  3. swellsharks
  4. swelltoad
  5. swelltoads
  6. swelly
  7. swelp
  8. swelt
  9. swelted
  10. swelter
  11. sweltered

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: swelly (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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