Dictionary

lumpishly en · ADV

Etymology

From lumpish + -ly.

Meanings

1. In a lumpish manner.
   • […] he is, as he affirms, a “people person”—his impulses are unfailingly awkward, his attempts at humor are lumpishly uncool, he’s accident-prone and fretful, but he’s also effusively sympathetic, optimistic, encouraging, and insistently pursuing sentimentally warm companionships based on little but a bottomless fund of sheer enthusiasm. 2016 October 21, Richard Brody, “‘Keeping Up with the Joneses’ and the marketing of cinematic charisma”, in The New Yorker:
   • He draped himself grotesquely in his toweling bathrobe and a pink and white couch-cover, and sat lumpishly in a wing-chair. 1922, Sinclair Lewis, chapter XXXIII, in Babbitt, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Company, →OCLC, section I:
   • 1640, Richard Brome, The English Moor, in Five New Playes, London: A. Crook, 1659, Act I, Scene 3, p. 12, Millicent. Construe more charitably, I beseech you, My Virgin blushes. Testy. ’Tis your sullenness; Would you have brided it so lumpishly With your spruce younker, that fine silken beggar, Whose Land lies in your Husbands counting house, Or the most part.
   • He stood there almost voiceless, lumpishly ugly with his face yellow and creased after the sleepless night, and his birthmark like a smear of dirt. 1934 October, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], “Chapter 19”, in Burmese Days, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, →OCLC:
   • Three or four ladies of distinction and liveliness used to say to one another, ‘Let us dine at our dear Merdle’s next Thursday. Whom shall we have?’ Our dear Merdle would then receive his instructions; and would sit heavily among the company at table and wander lumpishly about his drawing-rooms afterwards, only remarkable for appearing to have nothing to do with the entertainment beyond being in its way. 1855 December – 1857 June, Charles Dickens, “Chapter 12”, in Little Dorrit, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1857, →OCLC:
   • 1797, Robert Heron, A New General History of Scotland, Edinburgh: R. Morison & Son et al., Volume III, Book IV, Section II, p. 246, The men at arms or heavy-armed soldiery of the modern European armies, were so completely clad in massy steel; that it seemed as if the warriour thus armed, and then mounted on horseback, or placed in the field of fight, would scarcely be able either to advance or retire, or to do any thing else but bear the brunt of his adversary’s blow, to wield, himself, some awkward strokes, and to stand or fall lumpishly on the spot on which he was fixed.

Forms