Meanings
comparative more wittily · superlative most wittily
- in a witty manner; using wit.
[Bug:] You can parry and thrust wittily at a press conference?
1960 May 16, Walt Kelly, Pogo, comic strip, →ISBN, page 1464 more examples
When the mismatch is too great, baby can't get his mouth around the nipple and deep enough into the aureola to adequately draw milk. Deanne Francis, B.S.N., IBCLC, wittily refers to this condition as "oroboobular disproportion."
2008, Diana West, Lisa Marasco, The Breastfeeding Mother’s Guide to Making More Milk, pages 107-108Yet even as the two establishment candidates huffed and puffed to assert their authority, they seemed terrified by Mr. Obama’s insurgency, as if it were the plague in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” Mrs. Clinton held her nonconcession speech in a Manhattan bunker, banishing cellphone reception and television monitors carrying the news of Mr. Obama’s clinching of the nomination. Mr. McCain, laboring under the misapprehension that he was wittily skewering his opponent, compulsively invoked the Obama-patented mantra of “change” 33 times in his speech.
2008 June 8, Frank Rich, “One Historic Night, Two Americas”, in New York TimesHe has wittily redone a tardy epithalamium and some nursery rhymes ("Three blind eunuchs"), and deftly catches the cozy lawnfuls of plastic dwarfs and flamingos, outside the kenneled people.
1976, Choice - Volume 13, Issues 8-12, page 1300A few years after the creation of YouTube in 2005, the site was full of 'Hitchslap' videos, showing the master either wittily insulting interlocutors or simply stating his abhorrence of their views with great vehemence.
2020, Ben Burgis, Conrad Bongard Hamilton, Matthew McManus, Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson
Origin
- Middle Englishwittily
- Englishwittily
From Middle English wittily, wyttyly, wittiliche, equivalent to witty + -ly.
More words from Middle English
Full word history & related roots →Translations
Bulgarian остроумно
- остроумно (ostroumno)in a witty manner
Icelandic frumlega
- frumlegain a witty manner
Latin facete
- facetein a witty manner
Cite this entry
wittily. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/wittily
“wittily.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/wittily. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “wittily,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/wittily.
Source: wittily on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.