Dictionary

dashingly en · ADV

Etymology

Etymology tree English dashing Middle English -ly English -ly English dashingly From dashing + -ly.

Meanings

1. In a dashing manner. ▸ In a bold, spirited manner.
   • […] Sir Benjamin was compelled to put her into the possession of the solid sum of twenty thousand pounds; with one part of which her debts were paid to liberate Block from prison, and with the remainder he dashingly resolved to cut his employers, who had refused his drafts, and set up in trade for himself […] 1807, Francis Lathom, chapter 16, in Human Beings, volume 3, London: B. Crosby, pages 281–282:
   • […] what could be more dashingly brilliant in naval warfare than Drake’s raids on San Domingo, Carthagena, Cadiz, and other ports and cities of old and new Spain […] 1919, Walter Runciman, chapter 1, in Drake, Nelson and Napoleon, London: T. Fisher Unwin, page 32:
   • […] Gary Cooper and Franchot Tone, dashingly disobeying the King’s Regulations, rescue the colonel’s son from his Pathan torturers […] 1978, Jan Morris, chapter 17, in Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, published 1980, page 367:
   • Life must be lived dashingly, daringly, with perpetual display, even if the display was extremely expensive […] 1933, Virginia Woolf, “Dr. Burney’s Evening Party”, in W. Somerset Maugham, editor, Traveller’s Library, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, page 525:
2. In a dashing manner. ▸ In a boldly chic, fashionable manner.
   • He dressed by preference in checked overcoats and curly brimmed bowler hats that were at once dashingly smart and four decades out of date. 1935, George Orwell, chapter 4, in A Clergyman’s Daughter, New York: Avon, published 1970, page 144:
   • When a dashingly-clad officer addresses such a frumpishly dressed bum, he scolds him, as an officer in any army must. 1969, Kurt Vonnegut, chapter 5, in Slaughterhouse-Five, New York: Dial, published 2005, page 166:
   • 1816, Henry Koster, Travels in Brazil, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, Chapter 10, p. 188, The sedan chairs, in which the ladies go to church, and pay visits to their friends, had now put on a much smarter appearance, and the men who carried them were dressed more dashingly.
   • Now, at twenty, she was to be married to Harry McKee, […] a man of thirty-four who wore his clothes and his slang dashingly. 1929, Sinclair Lewis, chapter 3, in Dodsworth, New York: Harcourt, Brace:

Forms