How to Use gaily in a Sentence

gaily

adverb
  • The six girls were all wearing summer dresses, gaily colored.
    — Washington Post, 24 Sep. 2017
  • Casanova gaily set off for southern Italy, expecting to live well there.
    — Judith Thurman, The New Yorker, 20 June 2022
  • Bob Cummings plays the psychiatrist who listens to this gaily macabre tale.
    — James Powers, The Hollywood Reporter, 13 May 2018
  • For good measure, spotlighted and spinning mirror-balls send dots of light gaily skittering around the room.
    — Christopher Knight, latimes.com, 24 Feb. 2018
  • The boys all left for their virtual Italy, gaily waving their virtual berets and baguettes, and who was left behind to mow the lawn?
    — Scott Ostler, SFChronicle.com, 8 Mar. 2020
  • The rainbow of colors in the carpet tiles from Flor form a gaily irregular pattern.
    — Elizabeth Anne Hartman, WSJ, 17 Aug. 2017
  • Peer into their forbidding black hoods and gaily stitched pieces of hot-pink woolen felt inside invite unexpected visual caresses.
    — Christopher Knightart Critic, Los Angeles Times, 26 Mar. 2022
  • To make the gamma ray bells ring out gaily, the player lifts the little lead casings that cover the materials—and can do so in a rhythmic fashion to make a strange kind of song.
    — Eliza Strickland, IEEE Spectrum, 24 July 2018
  • The left’s decision to withdraw from conversations about genetics and social outcomes leaves a vacuum that the right has gaily filled.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 6 Sep. 2021
  • The east side of the field had been set apart for those in carriages, and soon from one end to the other, it was filled with vehicles of all descriptions gaily decorated in blue and gold and in white and red.
    — al, 22 Nov. 2021
  • The walls were gaily papered with Sunday supplements of the Mobile Register.
    — Kate Bolick, The New York Review of Books, 3 Aug. 2020
  • The walls were gaily papered with Sunday supplements of the Mobile Register.
    — Kate Bolick, The New York Review of Books, 20 Aug. 2020
  • The interior of jet was gaily bedecked with Christmas decorations, and flight attendants were adorned with reindeer antlers and twinkling lights.
    — Brian Albrecht, cleveland.com, 24 Dec. 2017
  • To dress cheerfully and becomingly is considered as an attempt to affect youth; to converse gaily an unsuitable effort to attract admirers.
    — Lisa Birnbach, Washington Post, 18 Oct. 2019
  • All the elements to the left of plutonium in the periodic table are quite willing to share electrons with each other, gaily forming compounds hither and thither; the elements to the right, far less so.
    — Valerie Brown, Discover Magazine, 28 Sep. 2018
  • Hot pink is the color of tropical Key West, from the garish bougainvillea spilling over every fence and wall to the petunias and hibiscus in its lush gardens to the houses and buildings themselves, gaily painted in every shade of pink.
    — Lee Smith, Southern Living, 19 June 2018
  • The ceilings are bolstered by beams of palm and eucalyptus, or geometrically coffered with wood strips in a traditional south Moroccan technique called tataoui or in one room gaily painted in the colorful Berber style.
    — Joshua Levine, WSJ, 13 Aug. 2018
  • Here the Carnival maskers don gaily colored costumes and mount horses to ride through the countryside gathering 'donations' of chickens and other ingredients for the gigantic community gumbo-cooking which occurs that night.
    — NOLA.com, 19 Jan. 2018
  • Subsequent investigations transform her into a rather more Nora Ephron-ish figure; few New Yorkers are more gaily, affirmatively opinionated.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 23 Dec. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'gaily.' 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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