pityingly r in a compassionate manner the nurse looked at him pityingly Usage(s) As we wait for our homeward taxi to arrive, we wonder, pityingly, why her husband hasn't joined her. The idea that anti-Catholicism is rampant strikes most non-Catholic Americans as self-pityingly sensitive or at least inaccurate. From across the Pearl River estuary, Hong Kong's worldly denizens once snickered pityingly at their small-town, Macanese cousins. Synonym(s) compassionately