gingerly

adv

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, […]”

   “[E]nter you the chambers peaceably, locke the dores gingerly, looke vpon your vviues wofully, but vpon the euill-doers, moſt vvickedly.”

   “Prithee, gentle officer, / Handle me gingerly, or I fall to pieces, / Before I can plead mine.”

   “[…] Sir W. Pen made a formal speech in answer to a question of the King's, whether the lying of the sunk ships in the river would spoil the river. But, Lord! how gingerly he answered it, and with a deal of do that he did not know whether it would be safe as to the enemy to have them taken up, but that doubtless it would be better for the river to have them taken up.”

2. (obsolete)Chiefly 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!”

adj

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.”

   “[P]enetrating cautiously into dark cellars, sallying with gingerly tread to the garden, now leaf-strewn by the autumn winds, […]”

   “During the extra session there were few crimes in the decalogue of which we were not accused, and all because of our old-fashioned tariff views and our quaint, blunt way of expressing them. While this treatment had its toughening effects, none the less did the Landmark’s icy rebuke mortify and silence us. We return to the painful subject in the gingerliest way imaginable, our mood far from affirmative, but interrogatory from first to last.”

   “The down "Atlantic Coast Express", headed by Pacific No. 35020 Bibby Line, passes the scene of operations at a gingerly 10 m.p.h.”

2. (obsolete)Often 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?”