the.com/sickly
A word that sounds fragile but survives every century of robust English usage.
means Frail and prone to illness, or having the pale, unhealthy look of someone who is — and by extension, anything faintly nauseating or feebly weak, like a sickly sweet smell or a sickly grin.
from Built from "sick" plus the adjective-forming suffix "-ly," which comes from Old English "-lic," originally meaning "having the form or body of" (the same "-ly" hiding inside "manly" and "friendly"). "Sick" itself is old Germanic stock — Old English "seoc," with cousins across the North Sea in Dutch "ziek" and German "siech." So "sickly" literally carries the sense of "having the body of illness," a fitting shape for a word that has always looked unwell.
- old roots
- Used since the 1500s for the chronically unwell
- sweet sense
- Also means nauseatingly sentimental or cloyingly sweet
- color cue
- A sickly pallor means greenish, yellow, or pale
- slang flip
- Gen Z sometimes uses sick to mean awesome
keats — poet who died of tuberculosis at 25 in 1821, wrote most major works while actively ill
dylan thomas — welsh poet plagued by pneumonia, bronchitis, and alcoholism, died at 39 in 1953
frida kahlo — mexican artist who painted from bed after bus accident at 18, endured 32 operations