Clumsy is being awkward with your body — the person who knocks the glass over reaching for the salt. Tripping on a flat floor, dropping the phone twice in a week, catching someone's elbow on the stairs.
It goes well beyond bodies. A clumsy sentence is badly put together, a clumsy apology makes things worse, a clumsy tool is heavy and hard to handle. The noun is clumsiness and the adverb is clumsily: he clumsily knocked the whole pile over. There is no verb — you cannot clumsy anything. About a person the word is mild, almost affectionate; about a plan or a piece of writing it is a real criticism.
The trail here is faint. Clumsy probably grew out of clumsed, which meant benumbed — the state of fingers too cold to hold anything — or else out of the old word clumse with a plain -y stuck on the end. Either way the picture behind it is the same: hands that will not do what you tell them.
Built from
Possibly from an alteration of clumsed (“benumbed”) or from clumse + y. More at clumse.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, A Song of Ice and Fire
First appears in chapter 7 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word