Dictionary

unlikelily en · ADV

Etymology

From unlikely + -ly.

Meanings

1. (rare) In an unlikely manner.
   • Along a different branch line we have returned to P. G. Wodehouse’s timeless world, to Bertie Wooster unlikelily compounded with Clarence Threepwood. 2001, Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Studies in Popular Culture), Manchester University Press, →ISBN, page 255:
   • He pictures Mr Bridges brooding most unlikelily on the career of Gabriele D’Annunzio (the aviator poet)[…] 1922, The Cambridge Review, page 344:
   • Is an ascendee a nominal which ascends (e.g. by Raising), or--unlikelily--one which is ascended? 1980, Papers from the Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, page 142:
   • As a rule novelists who treat of these people have a bad habit of making them out to be hopelessly idiotic or unlikelily vicious. 1908, The Academy, page 909:
   • I went to Swansea a fortnight ago, for two nights, saw Fred, Vernon, Walter Flower, John Prichard, Bill Henry, Mrs Giles of the Singleton, the Borough Architect, and Mr Ernest Davies is, unlikelily, a fashion-designer, unless he was pulling my leg with a crane, and makes, out of cardboard & cellophane, very tiny naked women who do a kind of arthritic can-can when he lights a match behind them. 1947, Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters, published 1985, page 618:
   • The report continued even more unlikelily that the police were allegedly converted to Communist views, that ‘Proletarian Hundreds’ were formed under police auspices, ostensibly to assist the regular force, and that generals of the former army who tried to attend commemorative parades of ex-servicemen were threatened with violence. 1984, Francis Carsten, Britain and the Weimar Republic: The British Documents, page 149:

Forms

Synonyms

unlikely