COWARDLY • FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • Definition of Cowardly

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/kˈaʊərdli/ Listen

adjective

Cowardly adj.

Wanting courage; basely or weakly timid or fearful; pusillanimous; spiritless. "The cowardly rascals that ran from the battle."

Proceeding from fear of danger or other consequences; befitting a coward; dastardly; base; as, cowardly malignity. "The cowardly rashness of those who dare not look danger in the face."

Synonyms: Timid; fearful; timorous; dastardly; pusillanimous; recreant; craven; faint-hearted; chicken-hearted; white-livered.

adverb

Cowardly adv. In the manner of a coward.

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Etymology of 'Cowardly'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Cowardly" Quotes from Famous Books

... always catching at the moment as it flew, he had not to fight with the timidities and irritations of a nervous temperament. His cheery courtesy was only disturbed when he became conscious of some sentiment which appeared to him mean or cowardly. On such occasions, not perhaps infrequent, his face looked as if his heart were physically fuming, and since his shell of stoicism was never quite melted by this heat, a very peculiar expression was the result, a sort of calm, sardonic, desperate, ...

— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... orders, overloud and galling to men surging with cowardly and insufferable haste. "Lower tobsail—haul! Belay! Ubber tobsail—haul, you sons of dogs! Haul, dere, blast you! You vant me to come over ...

— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon

... I strove to call up the hue and cry to come to the rescue, but the cowardly hinds were afraid of the thieves, and not one ...

— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge

... world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity—beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge—and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness ...

— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... for you—we were deceived! Four moons have scarcely run, Since cowardly you've forfeited what we so bravely won! Squandered and cast to every wind the gain our death had brought! Aye, all, we know—each word and deed our spirit-ears have caught! Like waves came thundering every sound of wrong the ...

— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

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