Definitions

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

  • adverb In a cloying manner; with distasteful excess.
  • adverb In an excessively sweet manner.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adverb in an overly sweet manner

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

cloying + -ly

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word cloyingly.

Examples

  • How could I not like someone who called the cloyingly brooding Angel “Angel cakes”?

    Lorne moves on to his next life 2009

  • The video's child-friendly dabbling with big ideas can seem cloyingly cute.

    The city as artifice, created as you watch Jason Edward Kaufman 2011

  • But I can tell you - walking into my backyard on a day like today: sunny, perfectly warm without being cloyingly sticky and not a cloud in the sky, inspiration is everywhere.

    Archive 2009-08-01 Sarah 2009

  • Ironically, for all the delicious aromas that fill the kitchen as this bread becomes reality, the finished loaf is not cloyingly sweet.

    It's Baaack! Sarah 2009

  • Ironically, for all the delicious aromas that fill the kitchen as this bread becomes reality, the finished loaf is not cloyingly sweet.

    Archive 2009-09-01 Sarah 2009

  • This is a train wreck of a movie, but it takes itself so seriously and it is so cloyingly Shaqcentric that it is nearly impossible to look away.

    Shaq’s Steel on DVD - The Retroist 2010

  • This jumbled exercise by Bulareyaung Pagarlava amounts to a shapeless sampler of miscellaneous moods and shticks, from the cloyingly cute to the utterly arbitrary.

    A Cautionary Tale in Dance Robert Greskovic 2011

  • Many of these vineyards survived, partly out of neglect, and partly because of the popularity of White Zinfandel, a cloyingly sweet "blush" wine created at Sutter Home Vineyard in 1975.

    The Power and Punch of Zinfandel Jay McInerney 2011

  • When Mr. Duncan opened a small gelato shop in Washington, D.C., in 2004, he found his engineering and software background rather useless when it came to fixing a vanilla gelato that came out cloyingly sweet, a chocolate gelato that was inexplicably hard and dulce de leche that was too runny.

    The Self-Taught Mad Genius of Gelato Alexandra Alter 2011

  • But I can tell you - walking into my backyard on a day like today: sunny, perfectly warm without being cloyingly sticky and not a cloud in the sky, inspiration is everywhere.

    Good Things GroOow... Sarah 2009

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.