How to Use archly in a Sentence

archly

adverb
  • Their exchanges often, too, featured an archly nerdy scientific patois.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 28 Jan. 2023
  • The idea of the decadent rich getting their kicks by brutalizing the indigenous people of a poor country and getting away with it might be archly satirical.
    — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 26 Jan. 2023
  • Melodies inevitably appear from inside the opiated haze of instrumentation and the sometimes archly clever wordplay.
    — Greg Kot, chicagotribune.com, 9 Oct. 2019
  • Barthelme wrote, for Texas Monthly, in an archly mocking response to McMurtry’s later essay.
    — Rachel Monroe, The New Yorker, 18 Sep. 2023
  • The show, which followed a crooked New Mexican lawyer, played by Bob Odenkirk, was an archly funny drama, shot partly in gritty black-and-white.
    — Rachel Syme, New Yorker, 29 Sep. 2025
  • Befitting of its title, the caustic novel is an archly acidic look at the celebrity death industrial complex and all those who seek to seize the narrative—and the spotlight—in the wake of a famous person’s death.
    — Chloe Schama, Vogue, 14 Sep. 2022
  • Breed smiled archly at the Chinatown dignitaries — and at her mentor, former Mayor Willie Brown — who were lined up alongside her on the platform.
    — Rachel Swan, San Francisco Chronicle, 18 Feb. 2018
  • The antebellum garb is an unmistakable Walker signature, but the scene is expressive and foreboding — not the archly comic and subversive work for which the artist is best known.
    — Kriston Capps, Washington Post, 4 Oct. 2023
  • Ruiz presents a range of archly ridiculous, melodramatic scenarios built on mixed signals, marred language and cross purposes among a populace emerging from a violent political nightmare.
    — Robert Abele, San Diego Union-Tribune, 27 June 2019
  • The dominance of the men’s game nearly everywhere else was the reality Germany’s women archly pointed up in a video noting that the prize for the first of their eight European championships was a tea set.
    — Siobhan Morrin, Time, 5 June 2019
  • Returning to her native West, the narrator confronts postpartum depression, addiction, the Manson family and more, in ways both world-weary and archly funny.
    — Los Angeles Times, 24 Aug. 2021
  • The reality of the situation in Zug was almost certainly less archly conspiratorial than the dossier alleged, but the problem of business as usual was precisely the point.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, WIRED, 18 June 2018
  • But there's plenty to savor in this first season, including archly broad comic-book baddies, dopily creepy lore, and classic(ally silly) CW illogic—all of it wrapped in the comforting conventions of a teen soap.
    — Alexis Gunderson, Chron, 1 Mar. 2023
  • This archly witty English pop-rock band has gained a fervent — and growing — American audience in the last two years, thanks in part to the reputation of its outspoken lead singer, Matthew Healy.
    — New York Times, 25 May 2017
  • Characters archly comment on proceedings directly to camera at some points and retreat into the staid distance of historical drama at others, as passages of seemingly earnest melodrama crash abruptly into broad-brush contemporary satire.
    — Guy Lodge, Variety, 20 Sep. 2025
  • Death Becomes Her, Robert Zemeckis’s archly malevolent 1992 comedic extravaganza, was a departure from her art-house fare.
    — Harper's BAZAAR, 3 May 2021
  • Much as Wes Anderson and Yorgos Lanthimos have plumbed Dafoe’s deliciously wicked sense of humor in pieces that straddle the line between the real and the archly stylized, Solnicki understands that a strong Dafoe performance must always teeter between the two.
    — Manuel Betancourt, Variety, 28 Sep. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'archly.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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