"portly" is correct and usable in written English.
The word means "heavily built or stout; plump." You can use it to describe someone's physical appearance or size. Example: The portly man in the corner was the first to congratulate us on our success.
Unlike ghosts and monsters, usually presented as imaginary, adults go to great lengths to maintain the illusion of the portly gentleman in the red suit.
Mr Turner is the outstanding result, a film that introduces the painter as a portly fellow with a top hat and a curmudgeonly expression in repose.
The assistant asked, "Does sir know his size?" I replied that in rude colonial Rhodesia where I had grown up, it was described in the trade as a "portly short".
The assembly elected Zafarullah Khan Jamali, a portly, genial character expected to prove a docile partner for the army.
Mr Marambio, dubbed in Cuba "the potbelly" because of his portly figure, became a multimillionaire.That apparently did not offend Mr Castro.
A few days earlier the portly young politician had been shown laying a foundation stone for a new office complex, funded by the Asian Development Bank; just before that he was named chairman of a new fund to protect a forest and an ancient pink quartz mountain range, the National Namal Uyana.He is on hand to inaugurate new bridges and roads.
But the portly, mustachioed man who stood looking at him, in a short-sleeved white shirt and blue trousers, hands clasped awkwardly in front of him, was not smiling.Velupillai Prabhakaran always said this was the moment, four years into the war in September 1987, when he gave up any faith in non-violence.
Russia's portly prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, is no athlete.
So far, the portly, shaven-headed 31-year-old, who recently abandoned his trendy striped shirts and expensive Breitling watches for a yellow T-shirt and Che Guevara-style black beret, has proved them wrong.
Portly, bald and impeccably dressed with cap, cape and cane, the professor is Japan's anti-Indiana Jones.
Grainy photographs of him show a portly, charismatic man with a bushy moustache and white jacket, always keeping up appearances.He lived on the rock continuously for ten to 12 months of each year from August 1896 to June 1903, sleeping on a damp bed of rock close to the landing strip in quarters carved out of the rock face, known to this day as "Kavanagh's hole".
