wetly

wet +‎ -ly

wetly (comparative more wetly, superlative most wetly)

1. In a wet manner.
   • 1846, Leigh Hunt, Stories from the Italian Poets, London: Chapman & Hall, Volume I, “The Journey Through Hell,” p. 134,

     They lay on one another in heaps, or attempted to crawl about—some itching madly with leprosies—some swollen and gasping with dropsies—some wetly reeking, like hands washed in winter-time.

   • 1916, Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes, The Red Cross Barge, London: Smith, Elder & Co., Part III, Chapter 2, p. 113,

     On a rickety low cart, drawn by a decrepit pony, was a large wooden packing-case on which some well-meaning hand had drawn, in black paint which still gleamed wetly in the sun, a rude cross.

   • 1961, Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, London: Macmillan, Chapter 4,

     She looked back just as closely through her little eyes, with the near-blackmailing insolence of her knowledge. Whereupon he kissed her long and wetly.

2. (Britain, informal) Ineffectually, feebly, showing no strength of character.
   • 2008, Michael Billington, “Independent Means,” The Guardian, 29 October, 2008,

     Rupert Frazer reveals the hollowness behind the elder Forsyth's tyrannical bluster, while Geoff Breton does all that is possible to reconcile us to his wetly conventional son.

   • 2012, Terence Blacker, “Fifty years after the satire boom, the country needs it more than ever,” The Independent, 27 August, 2012,

     Hypocrisy is all around us: in supermarkets with their fake green credentials, in a wetly liberal BBC, in publishers now falling over themselves to promote pornography, in a Government that wrings its hands about social problems—sport for children, the erosion of the countryside, gambling, greed—while at the same time busily exploiting and exacerbating them.

• Welty