adjective
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resembling or covered in scales
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peeling off in scales
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
Etymology
Origin of scaly
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
In it, a government scientist discovers that a scaly creature worshiped by island villagers as a sea god has grown to a monstrosity that dwarfs tall buildings.
From Salon ● Mar. 20, 2026
"I don't want to alarm anyone but there is a crocodile in the Sheraton pool," TikTok user Lisa Keller said in a video showing the scaly predator.
From Barron's ● Oct. 19, 2025
Determined to save her mother, Mae answers a supernatural summons and finds herself entering a cave where the flowers bloom under the bulging eyes of a dragon—a scaly, crimson, undulating monster straight from Chinese folklore.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2025
It is characterised by severely dry, red, scaly, and inflamed skin that is highly susceptible to infection and skin cancer.
From BBC ● Mar. 11, 2025
She laid a dry pinon branch on the coals; smoke curled out of the gray scaly bark like woolly hair until yellow flames burst around it.
From "Ceremony:" by Leslie Marmon Silko
But Sunny and Ned are a bit scalier that your typical lifelong mates — they are shingleback lizards that live at Melbourne Museum in Australia.
From New York Times ● Oct. 24, 2022
Anson, thinner and scalier and more snakelike than ever, was dealing a greasy, dirty deck of cards, his opponent being the square-shaped, black-visaged Moze.
From The Man of the Forest by Grey, Zane
If you were to let it have nothing to eat but mice and birds it might grow larger and fiercer, and scalier and tailier, and get wings and turn into the beginning of dragons.
From The Book of Dragons by Fell, H. Granville
In the midst there was a wonderful scalier or winding-stair, the entry whereof was without the house, in a vault or arch six fathom broad.
From Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 1 by Motteux, Peter Anthony
And for perhaps a minute there was one of the scaliest silences I've ever run up against.
From My Man Jeeves by Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)
The train of cars in which I was to trust my wallerable life, was the scaliest, rickytiest lookin lot of consarns that I ever saw on wheels afore.
From The Complete Works of Artemus Ward — Part 2: War by Ward, Artemus
For of all the scaly localities I have struck this seems to me the scaliest.
From Psmith, Journalist by Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)
They brought up the dirtiest, scaliest lookin' man in the guard-house, and said that was Si Klegg, and that he resembled me so much that they wuz sure he wuz my son.
From Si Klegg, Book 2 (of 6) Thru The Stone River Campaign And In Winter Quarters At Murfreesboro by McElroy, John
She did not know that this Congo River was the home of the Crocodile, the biggest, fiercest, scaliest, hungriest Crocodile in all Africa.
From The Curious Book of Birds by Smith, E. Boyd (Elmer Boyd)
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
