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haughtily

adverbC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — haughty sits at #11,168neutral

Haughtily means in a proud way that looks down on others. Reply haughtily.

It is nearly always used of somebody in a novel rather than in life. The word comes from the French for high, which is exactly the posture.

Definitions of haughtily

  1. 1adverbhaughtilyIn a proud way that looks down on others.C2

    “She answered haughtily and was right about everything.”

haughtily is a manner.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *kewk-

  2. Middle English

    hautein

  3. English

    haughty

  4. English, today

    haughtily

Built from

  • hault · Old French — high, lofty
  • *hōh · Frankish — high, lofty, proud

From haughty + -ly. haughty comes from earlier hauty, haultic, with spelling change in imitation of English naughty and English high, from Middle English hautein, hautain (with -ein, -ain becoming -y through the form hautenesse standing for hauteinnesse; see haughtiness), from Middle English haute (“self-important”), from Old French haut, hault (“high, lofty”), from Frankish hauh, hōh (“high, lofty, proud”) and Latin altus (“high, deep”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

haughtily in the wild

  • Like him he tried to influence Melanchthon by letters, but the latter treated Gallus rather haughtily.

    Nicolaus Gallus

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the hault family

haughty

haughtily — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others