![]() ![]() But in a few cases he notes ( haughty, dusky) they seem to have supplanted the shorter forms. Vasty survived, he said, only in imitation of Shakespeare cooly and moisty (Chaucer, hence Spenser) he regarded as fully obsolete. Jespersen ("Modern English Grammar," 1954) also lists bleaky (Dryden), bluey, greeny, and other color words, lanky, plumpy, stouty, and the slang rummy. Downy feathers definition: Something that is downy is filled or covered with small soft feathers. ![]() covered with fine soft hairs or down Familiarity information: DOWNY used as an adjective is rare. The forms were uncertain in Wyatt and Surrey's day, but verse-writers mostly adopted -y forms by Elizabethan times, and often the thing was artfully done, as in Sackville's "The wide waste places, and the hugy plain." Simple huge plain would have been a metrical balk.Īfter Coleridge's criticism of the -y forms as archaic artifice, poets gave up stilly (Moore probably was last to get away with it, with "Oft in the Stilly Night"), paly (which Keats and Coleridge himself had used) and the rest. Dictionary entry overview: What does downy mean DOWNY (adjective) The adjective DOWNY has 2 senses: 1. Variant forms in -y for short, common adjectives ( vasty, hugy) helped poets keep step with classical feet when the grammatically empty but metrically useful -e dropped off words in late Middle English. with other adjectives (for example crispy). Adjective edit downy ( comparative downier, superlative downiest ) Having down, covered with a soft fuzzy coating as of small feathers or hair. ![]() Originally added to nouns in Old English it was used from 13c. Adjective suffix, "full of or characterized by," from Old English -ig, from Proto-Germanic *-iga- (source also of Dutch, Danish, German -ig, Gothic -egs), from PIE -(i)ko-, adjectival suffix, cognate with elements in Greek -ikos, Latin -icus (see -ic). ![]()
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