gropingly

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grope

(grōp)

v. groped, grop·ing, gropes

v.intr.

1. To reach about uncertainly; feel one's way: groped for the telephone.

2. To search blindly or uncertainly: grope for an answer.

v.tr.

1. To make (one's way) by reaching about uncertainly.

2. Slang To handle or fondle for sexual pleasure.

The act or an instance of groping.

[Middle English gropen, from Old English grāpian.]

grop′er n.

grop′ing·ly adv.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Adv.

gropingly - in an uncertain groping manner

Translations

gropingly

adv → tastend

Collins German Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 7th Edition 2005. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1980 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007

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grope

References in classic literature ?

Then she put out her hand and began to feel gropingly about; then said, "I cannot find it; blow 'taps.'" It was the end.

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Gropingly backward into the past reached the fingers of memory, until at last they seized upon a faint picture, faded and yellow with the passing years.

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But it is gone an utterly as the faces and voices that made home around it, and that I was fierce to shut out of it, so that no sound or sight should molest me in the pursuit of the end which I sought gropingly, blindly, with very little hope, but with an intense ambition, and a courage that gave way under no burden, before no obstacle.

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Weak and reeling, I went out through the broken window and down the street, seeking to escape, instinctively and gropingly, from the awful shambles.

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They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles further when on a sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front, rising sheer from the grass.

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Presently they reached the bottom of the stairway, and Joan de Tany led him, gropingly, across what seemed, from their echoing footsteps, a large chamber.

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Soon he walked with his hand stretched out gropingly before him, and more than once the hand fetched up against the solid trunks of massive trees.

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He descended the one step, and advanced slowly and gropingly towards the grass-plat.

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Our hands met gropingly, lingered united in a steady, motionless clasp for a second.

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The natural history of this interesting creature was at last completely laid bare to the earnest stranger, who, as he sat there in the animated stillness, with the fragrant breath of the Western world in his nostrils, was convinced of what he had already suspected, that conversation in the great Republic was more yearningly, not to say gropingly, psychological than elsewhere.