coltish
/ˈkəʊltɪʃ
/adjective
Energetic but awkward in one’s movements or behaviour: long, lean, coltish women their impossibly coltish legs...
- They capture the coltish youth of two 16-year-olds in the throes of first love, but somehow missing is the fever of a relationship that spirals toward death.
- There she was gambolling around Covent Garden one afternoon in her school uniform, minding her own business, when a scout from Elite modelling agency caught sight of the coltish 15-year-old.
- They paid the princely sum of one shilling to queue up on the narrow staircase and head downstairs into a room filled with the noise of revelling mop-headed boys and coltish girls with pale-painted mouths and thick, black eyelashes.
Derivatives
coltishly
- He is coltishly appealing, brave, leathery, and a West Pointer.
- Instead of standing as if she were balancing a book on her head, she was knock-kneed and coltishly awkward.
- Critically acclaimed and coltishly adored, the album was recorded to the highest standards.
coltishness
- It gives off a kind of zeitgeist instead of coltishness and pride.
- Even now, her skinny blue-jeaned legs still betraying an awkward coltishness and her porcelain features devoid of makeup, she could pass as a pre-teen.
- The piece is bemused, tender and funny, the dancing evocative not only of the disgraced president's choppy gestures but also of the coltishness of adolescent girls.