shapelily

comparative more shapelily · superlative most shapelily

1. In a shapely manner.

   The beet of medium length (an intermediate variety) will grow shapelily in shallowly-dug or stony ground.

   1925 April 15, “Food Paragraphs”, in Derby Daily Telegraph, volume LXXV, number 14,153, page 6

   5 more examples

   […]in 1593, Sir Hugh Platt, of Lincolne’s Inne, Gentleman, produced his “Dyvers Soyles for manuring Pasture and Arable Land;” in 1594, his “Jewel-house of Art and Nature, containing divers rare and profitable Instructions, together with sundry new Experiments in the Art of Husbandry, distillation, and moulding;” and “Divers Chimicall conclusions;” a book which by Martin is thought to have been really the work of several hands, and to have been edited merely by Platt, who in his preface extols his “Conceyted book of Gardening, wherein he has set downe sundrie observations, which neither M. Tusser, though he have written shapelily, nor Master Hill though he have written painfully, nor Master Barnabe Googe though he have written soundlye, applying himself in his whole discourse both to our Soyle and Clymate, hath as yet discovered to the world.”

   1594?, preface; quoted in “Garden Literature”, in The Bookseller: A Handbook of British and Foreign Literature, with Which Is Incorporated Bent’s Literary Advertiser, Established in the Year 1802, number CXLVII, London, 1 April 1870, pages 317–318

   Ulysses meets in the mansion of Hades, not Hercules, who has been promoted to Olympus, and to “Hebe shapelily ankled,” but a phantom exactly resembling him.

   1861 December 14, “Buti’s Commentary on Dante”, in The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, volume 320, number 12, London, page 614

   Yet its meaning was such as might have accounted for a little irregularity and quite justified whatever emotional emphasis the appropriately placed ob! ah! and helas! always so neatly written, and with the interjectional point so shapelily marked, might be taken to convey.

   1864, Cecil Home [pen name; Augusta Webster], “The Sermon at the Oratoire”, in Lesley’s Guardians, volume III, London; Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., page 56

   The stump-rooted carrots carrots must be grown, and an intermediate (half-long) parsnip; but a long beetroot will grow shapelily, the roots of this vegetable growing upwards as well as downwards.

   1920 December 18, “Our Garden Circle. Allotment and Kitchen Gardens. Preparing the Plot.”, in The Hamilton Advertiser, 65th year, number 3309, page 3

   It would, therefore, never do to encourage these so shapelily and chromatically meritorious dears to follow out the dictates of womanly confidence and generosity to the point where they could bleat about it.

   1927, James Branch Cabell, “Wives at Caer Omn”, in Something About Eve: A Comedy of Fig-leaves, London: John Lane the Bodley Head Limited, part four (The Book of Dersam), page 78