They lay on one another in heaps, or attempted to crawl about—some itching madly with leprosies—some swollen and gasping with dropsies—some wetly reeking, like hands washed in winter-time.

1916, Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes, The Red Cross Barge, London: Smith, Elder & Co., Part III, Chapter 2, p. 113,
On a rickety low cart, drawn by a decrepit pony, was a large wooden packing-case on which some well-meaning hand had drawn, in black paint which still gleamed wetly in the sun, a rude cross.

She looked back just as closely through her little eyes, with the near-blackmailing insolence of her knowledge. Whereupon he kissed her long and wetly.

Rupert Frazer reveals the hollowness behind the elder Forsyth's tyrannical bluster, while Geoff Breton does all that is possible to reconcile us to his wetly conventional son.

Hypocrisy is all around us: in supermarkets with their fake green credentials, in a wetly liberal BBC, in publishers now falling over themselves to promote pornography, in a Government that wrings its hands about social problems—sport for children, the erosion of the countryside, gambling, greed—while at the same time busily exploiting and exacerbating them.

Wetly

Meaning

Adv