unlikelily

English

Etymology

From unlikely +‎ -ly.

Adverb

unlikelily (comparative more unlikelily, superlative most unlikelily)

1. (rare) In an unlikely manner.
   • 1908, The Academy, page 909:

     As a rule novelists who treat of these people have a bad habit of making them out to be hopelessly idiotic or unlikelily vicious.

   • 1922, The Cambridge Review, page 344:

     He pictures Mr Bridges brooding most unlikelily on the career of Gabriele D’Annunzio (the aviator poet) […]

   • 1947, Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters, published 1985, page 618:

     I went to Swansea a fortnight ago, for two nights, saw Fred, Vernon, Walter Flower, John Prichard, Bill Henry, Mrs Giles of the Singleton, the Borough Architect, and Mr Ernest Davies is, unlikelily, a fashion-designer, unless he was pulling my leg with a crane, and makes, out of cardboard & cellophane, very tiny naked women who do a kind of arthritic can-can when he lights a match behind them.

   • 1980, Papers from the Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, page 142:

     Is an ascendee a nominal which ascends (e.g. by Raising), or--unlikelily--one which is ascended?

   • 1984, Francis Carsten, Britain and the Weimar Republic: The British Documents, page 149:

     The report continued even more unlikelily that the police were allegedly converted to Communist views, that ‘Proletarian Hundreds’ were formed under police auspices, ostensibly to assist the regular force, and that generals of the former army who tried to attend commemorative parades of ex-servicemen were threatened with violence.

   • 2001, Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Studies in Popular Culture), Manchester University Press, →ISBN, page 255:

     Along a different branch line we have returned to P. G. Wodehouse’s timeless world, to Bertie Wooster unlikelily compounded with Clarence Threepwood.

Synonyms

• unlikely