Word.ws English Dictionary

wriest

wriest is the superlative form of wry.

Meaning of wry

Adjective

wry (comparative wrier or wryer, superlative wriest or wryest)

  1. Turned away, contorted (of the face or body).
    • '"Why, you snivelling, wry-faced, puny villain," gasped old Lobbs.1836 March – 1837 October, Charles Dickens, chapter 17, in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1837, →OCLC
  2. Dryly humorous; sardonic or ironic, usually in a way that suggests acknowledgement of a problem or difficult situation.
    • "[T]he master says a wry word now and then; and so ye let your spirits go down, don't ye see, and all sorts o' fancies comes into your head."1871, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, “chapter 6”, in The Haunted Baronet
    Synonyms:
    droll
  3. Twisted, bent, crooked.
  4. Deviating from the right direction; misdirected; out of place.
    • Catherine hath made a wry stitch in her broidery, when she was thinking of something else than her work.1820, [Walter Scott], chapter XXXIV, in The Abbot. […], volume III, Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne & Co.] for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; and for Archibald Constable and Company...

See all 9 meanings of wry

Forms of wriest

alternative formwryest

Questions about wriest

What is wriest the superlative form of?
Wriest is the superlative form of wry.

Words near wriest in the dictionary

  1. wride
  2. wrides
  3. wried
  4. wrier
  5. wries
  6. wriest
  7. wrig
  8. wrigged
  9. wrigging
  10. wriggle
  11. wriggle out of

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wriest (page history and authors); wry (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: “wriest.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wriest. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.