professedlyadv.

1569 T. Norton To Queenes Deceiued Subj. sig. Civ^v The glorious lustinesse wythout feare of God.., the adulteries, fornications, theftes,..and other mischiefes, in some of your captaynes professedly open and dayly exercised.

1570 J. Foxe Actes & Monumentes (rev. ed.) I. 831/2 He whiche wrote professedly against the superstitions of the people.

1641 J. Milton Reason Church-govt. Pref. 3 The reasons thereof are not formally, and profestly set downe.

1667 S. Pepys Diary 9 Jan. (1974) VIII. 9 The Commons do it professedly to prevent the King's dispensing with it.

1693 J. Dryden Disc. conc. Satire in J. Dryden et al. tr. Juvenal Satires p. viii Only Virgil, whom he profestly imitated, has surpass'd him, among the Romans.

1751 S. Johnson Rambler No. 175. ⁋13 Many there are, who openly and almost professedly regulate all their conduct by their love of money.

1765 H. Blair Crit. Diss. Poems of Ossian (ed. 2) 70 He professedly delights in strife and blood. He insults over the fallen.

1842 G. S. Faber Primitive Doctr. Election (ed. 2) i. i. 5 Those high-vaulting Ultraists, who professedly treat with contempt the harmonious voice of Aboriginal Antiquity.

1884 Law Times 77 382/2 Professedly written,..not for the lawyer, but for the commercial world.

1992 J. M. Kelly Short Hist. Western Legal Theory x. 392 The decades since the end of the Second World War..were marked by the confrontation of two power-blocs..the Western democracies..and the professedly Marxism authoritarian, one-party regimes.

1782 J. H. St. J. de Crèvecoeur Lett. from Amer. Farmer 211 It is something extraordinary to see this people, professedly so grave, and strangers to every branch of literature, reaching with pleasure the former work, which should seem to require some degree of taste.

1831 J. Mackintosh Hist. Eng. II. ii. 51 Buckingham..hastened with a body of adherents, professedly to join the king.

1856 J. A. Froude Hist. Eng. I. ii. 181 Her portraits, though all professedly by Holbein,..are singularly unlike each other.

1892 Law Times 93 551/1 The process of the court had been used by the solicitor professedly for one purpose, to levy a debt, but really for another purpose.

1913 Sat. Evening Post (Philadelphia) 22 Feb. 17/2 Only the common stock of Tinplate and Sheet Steel..was still of hypothetical value. These securities were selling very low on the market—professedly they were ‘capitalization of hope’.

1994 H. Bloom Western Canon ii. iii. 95 Even Teodolinda Barolini, in a book professedly written to detheologize Dante, allows herself to say that [etc.].