Adjective

(er)

Tall and thin, especially so as to cause physical awkwardness.

* 1872 , , chapter VII

I should have shot that long gangly lubber they called Hank, if I could have done it without crippling six or seven other people—but of course I couldn't

* 1917 , , chapter XV

A rangy, gangly , Scandinavian youth of a sailor, droop-shouldered, six feet six and slender as a lath, with pallid eyes of palest blue and skin and hair attuned to the same colour scheme, joined Kwaque in his work.

* 2007 , Oswald J. Schmitz, Ecology and Ecosystem Conservation? , page 34

Individuals of this rabbit species tend to be very large (about the size of a beagle dog); they have long ears and long, gangly legs and a very thin fur coats.

* {{quote-news

, year=2011 , date=October 15 , author=Owen Phillips , title=Stoke 2 - 0 Fulham , work=BBC Sport citation , page= , passage=[Peter Crouch] The gangly striker played a one-two with Jermaine Pennant as the winger cut in from the right, and although Pennant easily jinked past centre-half Brede Hangeland, he shot narrowly wide of the far post.}}

Adjective

(er)

Attractively thin; gracefully slender.

* 1990 , Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet , 2008, page 24,

Psychoanalytic theoryseemed to promise to introduce a certain becoming amplitude into discussions of what different people are like — only to turn, in its streamlined trajectory across so many institutional boundaries, into the sveltest of metatheoretical disciplines, sleeked down to such elegant operational entities as the'' mother, ''the'' father, ''the'' preoedipal, ''the'' oedipal, ''the other or Other.

* {{quote-news, year=2007, date=January 19, author=Charles Isherwood, title=Welterweight Bialystock Treads Softly on Big Shtick, work=New York Times citation

, passage=Clearly the producers of “The Producers” were so little inclined to tinker with a winning formula that they chose not to excise a few lines of dialogue to accommodate the svelter physique of their new leading man, preposterous though it is that anyone in a fit of pique would deride a fellow as “once-husky.”}}

* 2009 , Kim Bloomer, Animals Taught Me That , page 73,

My first priority was to help Trumps lose her pudgy look and gain a healthier, svelter size.

* 2010 , M. S. Simpson, Kabuki in a G-String , page 158,

If her dream of being naked in front of Simon were to come true – and she knew, somehow, that it would – she needed to be the sveltest version of herself that had ever existed. Fries wouldn't help peel away those pounds.

Refined, delicate.

* 1942 , Beryl Markham, West with the Night :

Peering down from the cockpit at grazing elephant, you have the feeling that what you are beholding is wonderful, but not authentic. It is not only incongruous in the sense that animals simply are not as big as trees, but also in the sense that the twentieth century, tidy and svelte with stainless steel as it is, would not possibly permit such prehistoric monsters to wander in its garden.