Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In a wavy manner, form, or direction.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adverb crookedly, twistingly, in a curved and winding manner

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

wavy +‎ -ly

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Examples

  • His figure lithe and taut from all the tennis and golf he played, the everyday 3 pm run down the Mall from 18th Street to the Capitol and back, his jaw taut and handsome no hint of the double chins plaguing Sadhana's husband now, at forty-one, his eyes a bright swimming-pool blue and his hair a Pantene ad, thick and wavily blond.

    For the Sake of the Boy Ramola D 2011

  • Surely you have some opinions about things others care about, and those opinions are at least hand-wavily justified?

    Dude. Where's My Tail? Walter Jon Williams 2007

  • With that chill and dread upon me, and the sheer rock all around, and the faint light heaving wavily on the silence of this gulf, I must have lost my wits and gone to the bottom, if there were any.

    Lorna Doone Richard Doddridge 2004

  • Mr. Rappit, the hairdresser, with his well-anointed coronal locks tending wavily upward, like the simulated pyramid of flame on a monumental urn, seemed to her at that moment the most formidable of her contemporaries, into whose street at Saint Ogg's she would carefully refrain from entering through the rest of her life.

    Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 Charles Herbert Sylvester

  • Mr. Rappit, the hair-dresser, with his well-anointed coronal locks tending wavily upward, like the simulated pyramid of flame on a monumental urn, seemed to her at that moment the most formidable of her contemporaries, into whose street at St. Ogg’s she would carefully refrain from entering through the rest of her life.

    IX. To Garum Firs. Book I—Boy and Girl 1917

  • Sitting opposite, he took up the oars and pulled out over the sheet of sparkling blue water, through which at first the bottom of white sand glimmered wavily but afterwards deepened to translucent, dim depths of greenness.

    Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 1908

  • Her opera cloak is thrown slightly from her shoulders, and her hair is a bit dishevelled and falls back wavily.

    Idle Comments 1905

  • For it is such a wondrous mixture of blooming plain and gleaming river and wavily-multitudinous mountain vaguely dotted with pale grey cities, that, placed as you are, roughly speaking, in the centre of Italy, you all but span the divine peninsula from sea to sea.

    Italian Hours Henry James 1879

  • -- Nasal-leaf large and square; lips with a triple fold of skin on each side; tragus vaguely developed and wavily emarginate; of a uniform light-brown colour, with maroon tips to the hairs of the upper parts; membranes black.

    Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon Robert Armitage Sterndale 1870

  • What does our modern artist do but flare it to right and left, lift it wavily over her forehead, revel in the oriental superabundance, and really seem to swear we shall admire it, against our traditions of the vegetable, as a poetical splendour.

    Complete Project Gutenberg Works of George Meredith George Meredith 1868

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