good-naturedly

comparative more good-naturedly · superlative most good-naturedly · alternative goodnaturedly

1. In a good-natured manner.

   [H]ere the woman ſav’d me: I pretended a violent diſorder of my head, and a feveriſh heat, that indiſpos’d me too much to receive his embraces. He gave into this, and good-naturedly deſiſted.

   Fanny Hill

   1749, [John Cleland], “[Letter the First]”, in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [Fanny Hill], volume I, London: […] [Thomas Parker] for G. Fenton [i.e., Fenton and Ralph Griffiths] […], →OCLC, pages 202–203

   2 more examples

   Anstruther laughed good-naturedly. “[…] I shall take out half a dozen intelligent maistries from our Press and get them to give our villagers instruction when they begin work and when they are in the fields.”

   1927, F. E. Penny, chapter 5, in Pulling the Strings

   Later [Edwin] Meese, virtual seconds before he resigned, purported to take the whole T-shirt episode—you are not hallucinating—good-naturedly. “I take it as the joke I hope it was meant to be,” the then attorney general said.

   1988 September, “Yikes! September! Anxiety season”, in E[dward] Graydon Carter, Kurt Andersen, editors, Spy […], New York, N.Y.: Spy Publishing Partners, →ISSN, →OCLC, pages 11–12