[...] the boy is a sickly lad, of a delicate frame, and particularly subject to a malady in his throat, which renders him very unfit for his Majesty’s service.
She is unfortunately of a sickly constitution, which has prevented her making that progress in many accomplishments which she could not otherwise have failed of;
[...] he saw him arrive with his usual florid appearance: had he come pale and sickly, Sandford had been kind to him; but in apparent good health and spirits, he could not form his mouth to tell him he was “glad to see him.”
Mr. Moore haunted his mill, his mill-yard, his dye-house, and his warehouse till the sickly dawn strengthened into day.
1870–1871 (date written), Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter XXXII, in Roughing It, Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company [et al.], published 1872, →OCLC, page 235:
It [the match] lit, burned blue and sickly, and then budded into a robust flame.
He held a vast but carefully concealed distaste for all things American […] their manners, their bastard architecture and sickly arts … and their blind, pathetic, arrogant belief in their superiority long after their sun had set.
The slightest distress, whether real or fictitious, touched him to the quick, and his soul laboured under a sickly sensibility of the miseries of others.
Don’t squander the gold of your days [...] trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age.
After a meal of bread, bacon, rum and bitter stewed tea sickly with sugar, we went up through the broken trees to the east of the village and up a long trench to battalion headquarters.
a.1768, Laurence Sterne, undated letter in Original Letters, London: Logographic Press, 1788, pp. 110-111,[21]
[...] if I thought the sentiments of your last letter were not the sentiments of a sickly moment—if I could be made to believe, for an instant, that they proceeded from you, in a sober, reflecting condition of your mind—I should give you over as incurable,
[...] the three years immediately following the last period [...] were years so sickly that the births were sunk to 10, 229, and the burials raised to 15, 068.
(obsolete) Tending to produce disease or poor health.
Thy Drudge contrives, and in our full career Sicklies our hopes with the pale hue of Fear;
1840, S. M. Heaton, edited by George Heaton, Thoughts on the Litany, by a naval officer’s orphan daughter[25], London: William Edward Painter, Section 4, p. 58:
[…]a cancer gnawing at the root of happiness, defeating every aim at permanent good in this world, and sicklying all sublunary joys[…]
1862, Gail Hamilton, “Men and Women”, in Country Living and Country Thinking[26], Boston: Ticknor and Fields, page 109:
He evidently thinks the sweet little innocents never heard or thought of such a thing before, and would go on burying their curly heads in books, and sicklying their rosy faces with “the pale cast of thought” till the end of time[…]
2000, Ninian Smart, chapter 9, in World Philosophies[27], New York: Routledge, page 207:
Ockham was critical of so many of his fellows for sicklying over theology with the obscurities of philosophy.
1889, Samuel Cox, An Expositor’s Notebook, London: Richard D. Dickinson, 7th edition, Chapter 26, p. 364,[28]
But the seven most prominent Apostles […] still hang together, their hearts tormented with eager yet sad questionings, their hopes fast sicklying over with the pale hues of doubt.