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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
gawky
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Despite the fact that he was tall for his age, he was gawky and skinny.
▪ It was gawky, hesitant, and brash.
▪ Not even the gawky years of adolescence would alter it.
▪ The local grammar school had put too much of a gawky human edge on his son's image.
▪ There are, of course, a few physically awkward, gawky, uncoordinated drivers.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Gawky

Gawky \Gawk"y\ (g[add]k"[y^]), a. [Compar. Gawkier (g[add]k"[i^]*[~e]r); superl. Gawkiest.] Foolish and awkward; clumsy; clownish; as, gawky behavior. -- n. A fellow who is awkward from being overgrown, or from stupidity, a gawk.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
gawky

"awkward, ungainly," 1724, from gawk hand "left hand" (1703), perhaps a contraction of gaulick, thus "gaulish hand," derogatory slang that could have originated during some period of strained Anglo-French relations, i.e. most of recorded history.

Wiktionary
gawky

a. awkward, ungainly; lacking grace or dexterity in movement

WordNet
gawky
  1. adj. lacking grace in movement or posture; "a gawky lad with long ungainly legs"; "clumsy fingers"; "what an ungainly creature a giraffe is"; "heaved his unwieldy figure out of his chair" [syn: clumsy, clunky, ungainly, unwieldy]

  2. [also: gawkiest, gawkier]

Usage examples of "gawky".

He had hands which were hard for all that they were long and tapered, and arms which seemed a little long, giving him a sort of gangling or gawky appearance.

Her mind filled with images of pale little Ana, with her knobbly knees and gawky features, sitting there during those dreadful family meetings in the eighties, so quiet and perfectly behaved.

His long frame was already rangily powerful, though still gawky with adolescence.

Mistress Harfor was round-faced and regally dignified, her hair in a neat gray bun atop her head, Master Norry tall and gawky as a wading-bird, with his little remaining hair sticking up behind his ears like sprays of white feathers.

She pushed the balky, gawky, protesting cart out of the wind and looked at the woman in the serape, ashamed to be so out of breath after moving less than a dozen yards but unable to help panting.

As Santar watched him move, he marveled at how his brother had grown just in the last few months, gaining the gawky, spindly proportions of an adolescent.

A gawky, familiar figure edged its way toward them through the gaudy press of market women and keelboat thugs, stevedores and flaneurs, and January recognized Esteban, followed closely by a tubby, pleasant-faced little gentleman wearing an overly elaborate lilac-striped cravat.

Northern Nursery sends out its hordes, and gawky hoydens and hobbletehoys are getting themselves accomplished in the foreign languages, music, drawing, geography, the use of the globes, and the dumb-bells.

The presence of the gawky guardian of their big sleep sent the voices wavering into lower tones, and he sometimes felt their eyes watching his back with uneasy curiosity.

Wulfgar inclined his head and poked Tem-Telek as though reminding a gawky apprentice to bow, then took hold of the dark shirt the lizardman was wearing over his cold-suit and pulled him from the chamber in the wake of the four servants and the goliwak.

He and his wife lived upstairs, and in the drawing and dining rooms, which had each French windows opening on the lawn, and all about the ground floor generally, Jessica, who was now a lean and lined and baldish but still very efficient and energetic old woman, kept her three cows and a multitude of gawky hens.

These people, even the gawky boy, radiated goodwill and confidence in the rightness of their presence here, this evening in the little orphanage outside Bogra.

With a subtle inclination of her body she effectively excluded Craig from the conversation, and left him feeling gawky and wordless on the fringe.

Kickaha flew just above the grass and the swelling hills and the trees and the great gray mammoths and mastodons and the giant shaggy black buffalo and the wild horses and the gawky, skinny, scared-faced Plains camels.

I said, thinking of the gawky almost-fifteen-yearold I had seen that morning, adrift in an Edinburgh filled with prostitutes, excisemen, smugglers, and hatchct-wielding Fiends.