Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In the manner of a colt; wantonly.

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

  • adverb In a coltish manner.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

coltish +‎ -ly

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Examples

  • She snuggles in toward me, rubbing her hair against my neck coltishly.

    Pru 2009

  • She snuggles in toward me, rubbing her hair against my neck coltishly.

    Pru 2009

  • Her alienated, out-of-step Mary Henry is one of horror cinema's great heroines and that image of her stepping coltishly out of the brine, back from the brink of death, is iconic on a Virgin Mary level.

    20 Girls 20 Arbogast 2008

  • Her long legs were almost coltishly thin, but well shaped.

    Texas! Chase Brown, Sandra, 1948- 1991

  • At length she woke with a start, shook herself coltishly, and they pushed on.

    While Caroline Was Growing Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon 1918

  • It goes back to the 05 Ashes I think; his fresh-faced schoolboy appearance and demeanour, skittishly, coltishly hopping around the crease in defence, against Warne in particular.

    The Guardian World News Rob Smyth 2011

  • As the final votes were being totted up on 1 May 1997, the atmosphere in Liverpool was coltishly optimistic.

    Politics news, UK and world political comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk 2010

  • Early on it does seem like they get it, introducing her as she reads an interminably precious essay on the fictitious high-living toddler Eloise, as if to say this privileged sophisticate is about to be schooled in the fact that the history of New York is written not in the ink of The Algonquin Roundtable but in the blood of the innocent; by the second act, however, as Erica is released from the hospital to the sanctity of her condo (where memories of her dead boyfriend center solely on their sex life) the film loses the courage of this conviction and becomes a 9mm REGARDING HENRY (1991), with Erica coltishly adjusting to a new world of pain depicted as a labyrinth of angles so canted I kept expecting Erica to walk into The Penguin's lair.

    Why ugly things happen to beautiful people Arbogast 2008

  • She scrambled to her feet and ran coltishly past him and over the bridge, hiding her face and calling gaily, "Come on!

    The Judge Rebecca West 1937

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