Word.ws English Dictionary

woodly

woodly adjective: covered in trees; Wooded; woodsy.

Adjective

woodly (comparative more woodly, superlative most woodly)

  1. (dated) Covered in trees; Wooded; woodsy.
    • So saying, by the hand he took me raised, And over fields and waters, as in air, Smooth sliding without step, last led me up A woodly mountain; whose high top was plain, A circuit wide enclosed, with goodliest trees Planted, with walks and bowers;1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost
    • Argonne, a woodly tract in France, partly in Upper Champagne, and partly in the Lower Barrois.1827, The Edinburgh Gazetteer, page 243
  2. Having tough, woody stems; woody.
    • Cuttings of bedding plants may nnow be made freely if wanted for next season, as young cuttings rooted in the fall make soft-wooded plants as pelargoniums, fuchsias, verbenas, heliotropes, &c.' with roses and plants of a woodly nature, however , the old plants usually do best.1910, The Encyclopedia Britannica, page 781
    • These are Sarracenia rubra which occurs in bogs and savannahs and Schisandra glabra a woodly vine found in rich woods .1976, Port Royal Harbor Maintenance Dredging, page 13

Adverb

woodly (comparative more woodly, superlative most woodly)

  1. (obsolete) Madly; furiously.

Examples of woodly in a sentence

  • The name was probably derived from shaw, a woodly glen, and fleet, a running stream .1945, Margaret Birney Pittis, Pittis Genealogy, page 25:
  • It were a woodly country and de boy outrun he chasers.2020, United States Work Projects Administration, Slave Narratives:
  • In some regions of the African continent and South America, cassava (Manihot esculenta), which is a woodly shrub, is consumed boiled or fermented (Fossi and Ndjouenkeu, 2017).2021, Mohammed Kuddus, Microbial Extremozymes, page 156:

Forms of woodly

Adjective
comparativemore woodly
superlativemost woodly
Adverb
comparativemore woodly
superlativemost woodly

Origin of woodly

From wood + -ly (adjectival suffix)

From Middle English wodly, wodliche (“furiously, wildly”), equivalent to wood (“mad, furious, wild, insane”) + -ly (adverbial suffix).

Questions about woodly

What does woodly mean?
Woodly means covered in trees; Wooded; woodsy.
How do you use woodly in a sentence?
The name was probably derived from shaw, a woodly glen, and fleet, a running stream .
What part of speech is woodly?
Woodly can be an adjective or an adverb.

Words near woodly in the dictionary

  1. woodlot
  2. woodlots
  3. woodlouse
  4. woodlouse spider
  5. woodlouse spiders
  6. woodly
  7. Woodlynne
  8. woodmaker
  9. woodmakers
  10. woodman
  11. Woodmancote

Source and license

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