jeeringly

English

Etymology

jeering + -ly

Adverb

jeeringly (comparative more jeeringly, superlative most jeeringly)

  1. In a jeering manner.
    • 1643, Jeremiah Burroughs, An Exposition of the Prophesie of Hosea, London, Volume 2, Chapter 5 Verse 2, p. 362,
      You shall find by common experience how your superstitious false worshipers slight the Word of God; they are above it, they speak jeeringly of the Scripture and of warrants from Gods Word; Oh you must do nothing but you must have Scripture for it: They cry up Fathers and antiquity, and such and such Writers, but for the Word of God they usually contemn and scorn it.
    • 1722, Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, London: E. Nutt et al., p. 78,
      [] they turned their Anger into ridiculing the Man, and his Sorrow for his Wife and Children; taunted him with want of Courage to leap into the great Pit, and go to Heaven, as they jeeringly express’d it, along with them, adding some very profane, and even blasphemous Expressions.
    • 1851, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 93,
      The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.
    • 1951, Sinclair Lewis, World So Wide, Chapter 8,
      The Florentine winter lasts only from mid-December to March, and in that season there are luminous days, but there are also jeeringly cold nights and days together when the tramontana wind comes devastatingly down from the Alps three pinched days at a spell, blowing pitilessly []
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