Word.ws English Dictionary

tumbly

tumbly adjective: moving by, or as if, tumbling.

Adjective

tumbly (comparative more tumbly, superlative most tumbly)

  1. Moving by, or as if, tumbling.
    • Chey is thought to function at the flagellar motor to elicit a tumbly behavior (Parkinson, 1977). Mutations in chey result in incessantly smooth-swimming behavior.1986, Ann Marie Maderis, Bacterial Chemotaxis: Che Genes and Their Products, page 9
  2. Heaped up in a formless mass; tumbled together.
    • I suppose it is unnecessary to stress the importance of color filters in photography. A sunset, a marine view or a tumbly mass of clouds will show the necessity of a set of color filters.1934, Nature Magazine, volumes 23-24, page 194

Forms of tumbly

comparativemore tumbly
superlativemost tumbly

Origin of tumbly

From tumble + -y.

Questions about tumbly

What does tumbly mean?
Tumbly means moving by, or as if, tumbling.
What part of speech is tumbly?
Tumbly is an adjective.

Words near tumbly in the dictionary

  1. Tumblrina
  2. Tumblrinas
  3. Tumblrite
  4. Tumblrites
  5. tumblrs
  6. tumbly
  7. tumbrel
  8. tumbrels
  9. tumbril
  10. tumbrill
  11. tumbrills

Source and license

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