Synonyms

• -ish
• -like
• -y
• (suggesting degree) -ous
• (suggesting degree) -some
• (likeness or resemblance) -oid, quasi-, para-, -form/-iform, -esque, -some, (restricted to casual registers) -ass, (forms adjectives from nouns only) -like

Derived terms

Translations

Usage notes

In prescriptive usage, derived adverbs in -ly are often preferred to those which are identical in form to the base adjective (e.g., badly instead of bad), despite the fact that the latter have been in continuous use since the earliest stages of the language and represent the norm in languages closely related to English, such as Dutch and German. This is the cause of hypercorrections such as I feel badly (where feel actually represents a copular verb, which traditionally requires an adjectival complement rather than an adverb).

Various sound changes and spelling changes occur for -ly:

• If an adjective ends with a consonant followed by y, it changes into i before adding the suffix (e.g. ready > readily, easy > easily). Speakers who pronounce final unstressed -y as /i/ replace this vowel sound with /ɪ/ or /ə/ before -ly.
  • If an adjective ends with -ary, the stress is often moved to the -a- in the derived adjective in -arily.
• If an adjective ends with ll, one l drops out to avoid a triple letter (e.g. full > fully, shrill > shrilly). The pronunciation may or may not be simplified to have a single /l/ sound: this is normal in frequent words such as fully, but less frequent words such as shrilly may be pronounced with double /ll/.
• If an adjective ends with a syllabic /l̩/ (spelled -le after a consonant), euphony causes the -le to drop out. Examples include -ably and -ibly, but also noble > nobly, ample > amply, and idle > idly, among others.
• For many speakers of non-rhoticCategory:Pages linking to anchors not found in Appendix:Glossary#non-rhotic accents, if this suffix is appended to words in -lar /lə/, the resulting sequence /ləli/~/ləlɪ/ may be haplologically simplified to /li/~/ləlɪ/, resulting in pronunciations of words like particularly and regularly such as /pəˈtɪkjəli/, /ˈɹɛɡjəli/ (as if spelt *particuly and *reguly). This is especially common in colloquial speech and for frequently-used words, so specularly is usually something like /ˈspɛkjələli/, not */ˈspɛkjəli/.
• Adjectives ending in -ic generally take -ally (public > publicly being an exception).
• If an adjective ends with -ed, the pronunciation is sometimes changed from /d/ or /t/ to /ɪd/ before -ly. For example, deserved /dɪˈzɜː(ɹ)vd/ and deservedly /dɪˈzɜː(ɹ)vɪdli/.

Derived terms

• -ally

Translations

Usage notes

• -ly is generally the most common variant of this suffix, though in some words, other variants may be more common, such as -lich(e).

Derived terms

Descendants

• English: -ly
• Scots: -lie

References

• “-lī, suf.(1).”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 7 April 2018.

Usage notes

• As with its adjectival equivalent, -ly is generally the most common variant of this suffix, though in some words, other variants may be more common, such as -lich(e).

Derived terms