Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Relating to, consisting of, or covered with wool.
- adj. Resembling wool.
- adj. Lacking sharp detail or clarity: woolly television reception.
- adj. Mentally or intellectually disorganized or unclear: woolly thinking.
- adj. Having the characteristics of the rough, generally lawless atmosphere of the American frontier: wild and woolly.
- n. A garment made of wool, especially an undergarment of knitted wool.
- n. Australian A sheep.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Con sisting of wool; fleecy: as, the woolly coat of the sheep, of a young seal, etc.
- Resembling wool; exhibiting woolliness; having the appearance of wool: as, woolly hair; woolly clouds.
- Clothed or covered with wool, or something like it; pubescent; flocculent.
- In hot., covered with a pubescence of long and soft hairs like wool; lanate; tomentose.
Wiktionary
- adj. Made of wool.
- adj. Having a thick, soft texture, as if made of wool.
- adj. figuratively Of thinking, principles, etc, based on emotion rather than logic.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Consisting of wool.
- adj. Resembling wool; of the nature of wool.
- adj. Clothed with wool.
- adj. (Bot.) Clothed with a fine, curly pubescence resembling wool.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. covered with dense cottony hairs or hairlike filaments
- adj. having a fluffy character or appearance
- adj. covered with dense often matted or curly hairs
- adj. confused and vague; used especially of thinking
Etymologies
- From wool + -y. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“Brenden wants a two-year moratorium on relocating bison until state officials write a management plan for what he calls "woolly tanks" that can wreak havoc on crops and land.”
“Davies 'piece was not an exercise in woolly thinking, calculated to cast the net of inclusivity as wide as possible by purporting to dissolve the hard distinction between affirming God's existence and denying it.”
“The brown and yellow larvae are sometimes called woolly bears because of their hairy appearance and their habit of eating wool.”
“And hemlocks are being killed by an organism called woolly adelgid, not woody adelgid.”
“He therefore purchased articles that even in England would be called woolly and comfortable.”
“It's still audible - she struggles sometimes with the "d" in "Woody," so that it sounds like "woolly" - but it has certainly mellowed since the days when she first went to Hollywood and had to learn her lines for The Hi-Lo Country phonetically, never really understanding a word she was saying.”
“Other inhabitants include the endangered mountain tapir (often called the woolly tapir), the red-brocket deer, and the spectacled bear.”
“Other shrubland/grasslands include shrub species uncommon in eastern Oregon, such as woolly wyethia, Klamath plum, and birchleaf mountain mahogany.”
“To the list of victims such as woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats, a Smithsonian-led team of scientists has added one more: a highly carnivorous form of wolf that lived in Alaska, north of the ice sheets.”
“And that's not just an appeal for some kind of woolly, Anglican, 'fudge', it's more an appeal for what I hope is the real Gospel virtue of 'deep listening' to one another: a listening which at times makes you say, 'Though this looks right to me, this isn't just about me.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘woolly’.
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UK Usage - Find US Equivalent
All these terms have a (different) American English equivalent. Wonder if you can identify them?
abridgement (abri..., accoutrement, accoutre, acknowledgement (..., opposite, advert, adaptor, adapter, sticking plaster, advertise, adviser (advisor ..., adze, aesthete and 1196 more...
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sheep and goats
sheep and more sheep and some
slang for sheep,films that feature sheep ,have you heard of sheeple?
and goatsammon, ancon, argali, bharal, burrel, burrell, burhel, burrhel, bighorn, billy, blackface, broadtail and 144 more...
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INTERP - speeches can be...
adequate, adroit, blunt, blurred, committed, divisive, exacerbating, fitting, hollow, lengthy, murky, pronounced and 123 more...
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Adjectives with 2 syllables that end ...
angry, bossy, busy, chilly, cheesy, creepy, dirty, early, funny, hairy, happy, healthy and 126 more...
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Adjectives
sagacious, average, angry, mad, crazy, giant, ugly, pretty, happy, sad, lonely, solitary and 119 more...
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wreckingball's Words
reprehensible, problematize, crepuscular, deleterious, pestilent, strumpet, draggletail, interrobang, meretricious, systematize, schadenfreude, capricious and 443 more...
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Hitch Words
Words from the lexicon of Christopher Hitchens
propinquity, fratricide, factitious, vitiate, sectarianism, ostensible, atavistic, sephardic, doyen, palpable, encephalitic, fastidious and 188 more...
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stpeter's Words
abase, abasement, abashed, abdicate, aberrant, abeyance, abhor, abhorrent, abide, abject, ablation, abnegation and 3536 more...
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What's next here?
thunderhead, thundercloud, cumulus, cumulonimbus, fibrous, hazy, glaciated, cirrus, nimbus, meteorology, fahrenheit, thermoscope and 285 more...
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today's word
copemate, quiddity, ere, maugre, argal, cultivar, exurb, spokesmodel, rollick, logy, cadastral, corpulent and 259 more...
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Aussie: ie/ee/y/ey
Australians are in love with having an 'ee' sound on the end of their words. Typically, take a word and chop it down to the shortest it can be while still understandable, then add an 'ee' sound; sp...
brickie, telly, barbie, footy, housie, billy, bodgie, pokie, bodgy, talkie, chrissy, u-ie and 40 more...
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Way out in the woods
Foresters and loggers have a language all their own.
cruise, landing, chain, peavey, skidder, prescribed burn, shelterwood, clearcut, plantation, silviculture, thinning, weed species and 12 more...
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Wild About Hairy
Hairy words. Much pilfered from G. Cook's Hairy list.
woolly, whiskered, villous, unshorn, unshaven, tufted, stubbly, shaggy, pubescent, pilose, piligerous, piliferous and 58 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for woolly.
bilby Australian slang - the city of Wollongong. Apr 16, 2008
pomegranate "Woolly" describes a forest stand so thick with underbrush that it is difficult to walk through. Dec 11, 2007