gropingly

comparative more gropingly · superlative most gropingly

1. In a groping manner; blindly.

   1881, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Letter to Robert Bridges dated 27 April, 1881 in Claude Colleer Abbott (editor), Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, Oxford University Press, 1935, p. 125, I am gropingly making my way into harmony and may come to harmonise some of my airs.

   3 more examples

   […] all other sects of Philosophers, have but like men in Cimmerian darkenesse, gropingly stumbled, now and then, upon the nature of the true God-head […]

   1635, David Person, Varieties: or, A surveigh of rare and excellent matters necessary and delectable for all sorts of persons, London: Thomas Alchorn, Book 4, Section 1, p. 230

   With the impetus of his rush the man drove straight on, his face suddenly gaping disfigured, with his hands open before him gropingly, as though blinded, and landed with terrific violence on his forehead, just short of Jim’s bare toes.

   1900, Joseph Conrad, chapter 31, in Lord Jim, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, page 323

   Toward the end of the year Greg, normally a sound sleeper, started to sleep poorly, to get up in the middle of the night and wander gropingly for hours around his room.

   1995, Oliver Sacks, “The Last Hippie”, in An Anthropologist on Mars, New York: Knopf, page 72