wintry
/ˈwɪnt(ə)ri
/(also wintery /ˈwɪnt(ə)ri/)
adjective (wintrier, wintriest)
Characteristic of winter, especially in feeling or looking very cold and bleak: a wintry landscape...
- We see all four girls training for the sprint relay on a bitterly cold wintry day, with constant rain lashing the track.
- His adrenaline did not the let the cold wintry night chill his bones, he felt as warm as could be.
- Admittedly we hesitate on cold, wintry mornings when needles of rain spike the bedroom window.
Synonyms
bleak, cold, chilly, frosty, freezing, icy, snowy, icy-cold, arctic, glacial, frigid, bitter, biting, piercing, sharp, raw
informal nippy
British informal parky
literary chill
rare hyperborean, hibernal, hiemal, brumal
unfriendly, cool, chilly, cold, frosty, frigid, glacial, bleak, distant, remote
Derivatives
wintrily
- You'll see ice palaces of crystal-clear beauty, which will lead you even on hot summer days into a wintrily world of ice.
- I'd have sworn he was still burning the way his body shone. Barr's tone is homely, gnarled, wintrily pastoral.
- Its own crushed infinity of crystals, its own richness of tiny sculpture, fills it, when regarded near at hand, with wonderful depths of coloured shadow, and, though wintrily transformed, it is still water, and has watery tones of blue.
wintriness
- There is supporting evidence as to the wintriness in Dickens's description of the bleak skies, cold rain, and mud that accompanies Martin's tumbril-like journey by cart from Salisbury to London.
- This brief and lovely piece is born of a kind of dreamy wintriness that is immediately captivating.
- There was no breeze next to the deserted highway, but the air was filled with prickly wintriness.
Origin
Old English wintrig (see winter, -y1).