bullyishly

comparative more bullyishly · superlative most bullyishly

1. informalIn a bullyish manner.

   A noisy fly with a showy metallic back, a coarse fellow, lighted on the ground and buzzed bullyishly, his insistent voice demanding to be heard although it had only vapid repetitions to make.

   1950, Margaret Shedd, “Sunday, March 23, 1947”, in Return to the Beach, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, →OCLC, part 1, page 96

   2 more examples

   He delivered her to a cold-faced buff brick apartment house not far from downtown. It had a pinched and pained look, from the way its greater and finer neighbors to either side crowded bullyishly against it.

   1958, Al Dewlen, chapter X, in The Bone Pickers, New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill Book Company, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 193

   James Silver, Professor of History at the University of Mississippi, speaks of his state the “closed society,” and it is this kind of mentality which has grown bullyishly strong on a menu of hate and negativism, with the grievous result that Mississippi is almost “another country.”

   1965 winter, Luther H[ilton] Foster [Jr.], “The American Negro in Transition: An Overview”, in The Michigan Quarterly Review, volume IV, number 1, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 37, columns 1–2