motherlily

comparative more motherlily · superlative most motherlily

1. rareIn a motherly manner.

   For a long minute they embraced, as though mother and child, each needing the other. Moneeq, now down on one knee, looked Nick motherlily in the eye.

   2006 April 27, Dennis Glawe, chapter 43, in Gifts from Decorah Laurah, Bloomington, Ind.; Central Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire: AuthorHouse, →ISBN, part 17 (Seeking Treasure), page 570

   5 more examples

   Why do I feel the need to add a second "-ly" to adjectives already ending in "-ly" when abverbializing them? […] "Don't worry about it," she reassured him motherlily.

   2005 October 29, PR, “Lily Mad”, in alt.usage.english (Usenet), archived from the original on 07 Oct 2025

   When you see Joyous beam, you beam. Bart beams warmly. […] The shape of his gonads must set the ambit of his emotions? No. Fathers worry about the little bugger’s sport’s prowess. What Bart feels like is mother. He notices that the more orthodoxly mother-type person next to him is not beaming motherlily. She is not beaming at all. Her mouth is set like the wardress of Belsen wishing to boil Joyous’s chubby cheeks into candle wax.

   2008, Denis Beckett, “Explaining prawns”, in Magenta, Scottsville, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press; Johannesburg: Saga Press, →ISBN, pages 82–83

   Ghostlily, motherlily, manlily, beastlily are all dictionary-approved but prohibitively awkward, as is, in another way, lily-liveredly, Likylikely, though . . . […] In American English, at least, there seems to be no way to say something along these lines: “For the nine months I carried you, growing inside me, no charge,” Tammy Wynette sang motherlily.

   2011, Roy Blount Jr., “-ly”, in Alphabetter Juice: or, The Joy of Text, New York, N.Y.: Sara Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN, page 145

   The adjectival suffix -ly, which attaches to person nouns, does not generally allow a subsequent -ly: *gentlemanlily, *motherlily, *neighbourlily, *womanlily.

   [2013, Laurie Bauer, Rochelle Lieber, Ingo Plag, “The suffix -ly”, in The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (Oxford Linguistics), Oxford, Oxfordshire; New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, published 2015, →ISBN, part III (Derivation), chapter 15 (Derived adverbs), section 3 (Suffixation), page 325

   “It’s going to be fine,” Mother said in her soothing motherly voice. “Is it?” I whispered. “Yes squishy Josh, it will,” she motherlily soothed me.

   2021, Josh Carrott, “Qingdao”, in Once upon a Time in Carrotland: My YouTube Autobiography Which I Definitely Wrote All Of, [Portsmouth, Hampshire]: Compass-Publishing UK, →ISBN

   Synonyms: motherly, maternally