stockish

Many who have “plied their book diligently,” and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life.

Virginibus Puerisque and other papers 2005

The pilgrim is throughout a pale and stockish figure; but the devil covers a multitude of defects.

Lay Morals 2005

From another less analytical viewpoint, music was thought, also, to possess an inspired virtue, not easily defined, but revealed in its power to alter man's very being: there is “nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage,/But music for the time doth change his nature”

Dictionary of the History of Ideas GRETCHEN LUDKE FINNEY 1968

There were just the two towers on the summit and the two on the slope of the hill whose bases were set on grassy mounds so that they stood level with the others, and these had been built of such stockish material that they had not had features given them by ruin.

The Judge Rebecca West 1937

He crushed with his contempt the two stockish imbeciles who did not understand the sublimity of his song, which opened wide the heavens!

Jean-Christophe, Volume I Romain Rolland 1905

And while I stood there, stockish and stupid, the pair became aware of me.

Marjorie 1898

As for Catriona, she seemed quite carried away; her laugh was like a peal of bells, her face gay as a May morning; and I own, although I was well pleased, yet I was a little sad also, and thought myself a dull, stockish character in comparison of my friend, and very unfit to come into a young maid's life, and perhaps ding down her gaiety.

David Balfour, a sequel to Kidnapped. 1893

I could never deny, in looking back upon what followed, that I was eminently stockish; and I must say the ladies were well drilled to have so long a patience with me.

David Balfour, a sequel to Kidnapped. 1893

The pilgrim is throughout a pale and stockish figure; but the devil covers a multitude of defects.

Lay Morals Robert Louis Stevenson 1872

My cousin said he prayed that her prophecy might come true, but I remained hard and stockish.

More Pages from a Journal Mark Rutherford 1872