- 1小心翼翼地、輕手輕腳地
If you move gingerly, or touch something gingerly, you do it slowly and with care, because you think it might hurt, break, or be dangerous. You test the ice with one foot. You pick up a hot plate as if it might still burn. You sit down gingerly after a fall. The feeling is caution mixed with a little fear, not ceremony. It is a normal, slightly colourful word — fine in speech and in writing. You will meet it as an adverb most of the time (walk gingerly). The adjective exists too (a gingerly step), and that adjective actually came from the adverb, probably because -ly also makes . It has nothing to do with the spice ginger, even though it looks as if it should.
組成The second piece is -ly. The first piece may be Anglo-Norman gençur or Old French gençor / gensor, comparative forms of gent (“beautiful, noble, pleasant, courteous”). That is only a maybe: those French forms disappear for a few centuries before gingerly shows up, so scholars are not sure the line is real. The adjective is derived from the adverb.
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
gingerlyadv/ˈdʒɪn(d)ʒəli/
- 1
In a cautious and delicate manner; (very) carefully or cautiously.
- He placed the glass jar gingerly on the concrete step.
- In an other corner, Mistris Minx, a marchants wife, that will eate no cherries, forsooth, but when they are at twentie shillings a pound, that lookes as simperingly as if she were besmeard, and iets it as gingerly as if she were dancing the canaries, […]
- 2
obsoleteChiefly of dancing or walking: done with small, dainty steps; daintily; also, with excessive delicacy; affectedly, mincingly.
- Oh! ſhe lookes ſo ſugredly, ſo ſimpringly, ſo gingerly, ſo amarouſly, ſo amiably. […] [She] is ſuch an intycing ſhee-vvitch, carrying the charmes of your Ievvels about her. Oh!
gingerlyadj/ˈdʒɪn(d)ʒəli/
- 1
Often of movements: very careful, cautious, or delicate.
- We can honestly commend the Atlantic Monthly as the most able and spirited of American periodicals, at the present time, and we like it, moreover, because it dares have opinions and to express them in unmistakable terms, on subjects which when referred to at all, by most of the current magazines, are mentioned in the gingerliest namby-pamby style of common place neutrality.
- But, ther's somethin' in the very look and voice of Jeems Strebling, even in his gingerly walk, that riles all the black drop in me.
- 2
obsoleteOften of a person or the way they move: dainty, delicate; also, excessively delicate; affected, mincing.
- All yᵉ rest of my trimmest, tricksiest, gingerliest ioyes, / But very tædious and most odious toyes?
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。