Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Of, resembling, or
overgrown withnettles .
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
nettle + -y
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Examples
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He should have trouble yet with her, hideous scenes, in which the corpse of his dead lust would be dragged up, a thing to shudder at, out of its nettly grave.
Red Pottage 2004
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He should have trouble yet with her, hideous scenes, in which the corpse of his dead lust would be dragged up, a thing to shudder at, out of its nettly grave.
Red Pottage Mary Cholmondeley 1892
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I’ve often thought epistolary exchange between writers to be the most nettly of writing, both the most effusive and the most sincere, the most pretentious and the most vein-splittingly self-conscious.
she commented on the word nettly
adj., Of a place: overgrown with nettles; Suggestive of nettles or their flavor, etc.; Of a person: irritable.
(Nettle + -y. Dutch netelig, 'tricky, ticklish, delicate,' could perhaps be a parallel formation, but is not recorded in the literal sense, and many etymologists connect it instead with Middle Dutch and Middle Low German nīten, 'to hit, push.')
August 6, 2008