Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

stately

UK/ˈsteɪtli/
adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,958 of 15,258leans written

Stately means dignified and impressive in manner or scale. A stately home, a stately pace, stately and slow.

A stately home is a specific British thing: a great country house open to the public, and the phrase carries a whole world of tea rooms and gift shops. Of movement it means slow with dignity rather than merely slow.

Definitions of stately

  1. 1adjectivestatelyDignified and impressive in manner or scale.C1

    “A stately old oak tree stood in the middle of the park.”

stately is a quality.

Where it comes from

State plus -ly, from state in the sense of high rank or grandeur.

  1. Middle English

    staately

  2. English, today

    stately

From Middle English staately, staatly, stateli, statelie, stately, statelyche, statelye, statli, statly. Compare stour. by surface analysis, en + state + ly.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

stately in the wild

  • Lambton Castle stands above Chester-le-Street, County Durham and is a stately home, the ancestral seat of the Lambton family, the Earls of Durham.

    Lambton Castle

  • The title of the play was derived from the line "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul" in the poem The Chambered Nautilus by Oliver Wendell Holmes.

    More Stately Mansions

  • The gardens lie on the grounds of an 18th-century stately home, Bught House.

    Bught Park

  • An 18th century stately home on the site was demolished for the creation of the Ice Centre in the 1960s.

    Bught Park

  • Stagenhoe is a Grade II listed stately home and surrounding gardens located in the village of St Paul's Walden in Hertfordshire.

    Stagenhoe

1 / 2

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.