The
suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...
''-ly'' in English is usually a contraction of ''-like'', similar to the
Anglo-Saxon
The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a Cultural identity, cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced t ...
''-lice'' and
German ''-lich''. It is commonly added to an
adjective
An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...
to form an
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by ...
, but in some cases it is used to form an adjective, such as ''ugly'' or ''manly''. When "-ly" is used to form an adjective, it is attached to a noun instead of an adjective (i.e., ''friendly'', ''lovely''). The adjective to which the suffix is added may have been lost from the language, as in the case of ''early'', in which the Anglo-Saxon word ''aer'' only survives in the poetic usage ''ere''.
Though the origin of the suffix is Germanic, it may now be added to adjectives of
Latin
Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
origin, as in ''publicly''.
[
When the suffix is added to a word ending in the letter ''y'', the ''y'' before the suffix is replaced with the letter ''i'', as in ''happily'' (from ''happy''). This does not always apply in the case of monosyllabic words; for example, ''shy'' becomes ''shyly'' (but ''dry'' can become ''dryly'' or ''drily'', and ''gay'' becomes ''gaily''). Other examples are ''heavily'' (from ''heavy''), ''luckily'' (from ''lucky''), ''temporarily'' (from ''temporary''), ''easily'' (from ''easy''), ''emptily'' (from ''empty''), and ''funnily'' (from ''funny'').
When the suffix is added to a word ending in double ''l'', only ''y'' is added with no additional ''l''; for example, ''full'' becomes ''fully''. Note also ''wholly'' (from ''whole''), which may be pronounced either with a single ''l'' sound (like ''holy'') or with a doubled (]geminate
In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...
) ''l''.
When the suffix is added to an adjective ending in a vowel letter followed by the letter ''l'', it results in an adverb spelled with ''-lly,'' for example, the adverb ''centrally'' from the adjective ''central,'' but without a geminated l sound in pronunciation. Other examples are ''actually'', ''historically'', ''really'', ''carefully'', ''especially'', and ''usually''. When the suffix is added to a word ending in a consonant followed by ''le'' (pronounced as a syllabic ''l''), generally the mute ''e'' is dropped, the ''l'' loses its syllabic nature, and no additional ''l'' is added; this category is mostly composed of adverbs that end in ''-ably'' or ''-ibly'' (and correspond to adjectives ending in ''-able'' or ''-ible''), such as ''probably'', ''presumably'', ''visibly'', ''terribly'', ''horribly'' and ''possibly'', but it also includes other words such as ''nobly,'' ''feebly,'' ''simply'', ''doubly'', ''triply,'' ''quadriply'' and ''idly.'' However, there are a few words where this contraction is not always applied, such as ''brittlely.''
When ''-ly'' is added to an adjective ending ''-ic'', the adjective is usually first expanded by the addition of ''-al''. For example, there are adjectives ''historic'' and ''historical'', but the only adverb is ''historically''. Other examples are ''basically'', ''alphabetically'', ''scientifically'', ''chemically'', ''classically'', and ''astronomically''. There are a few exceptions such as ''publicly.''
Adjectives in ''-ly'' can form inflected comparative and superlative forms (such as ''friendlier, friendliest'', ''lovelier'', ''loveliest''), but most adverbs with this ending do not (a word such as ''sweetly'' uses the periphrastic
In linguistics and literature, periphrasis () is the use of a larger number of words, with an implicit comparison to the possibility of using fewer. The comparison may be within a language or between languages. For example, "more happy" is periph ...
forms ''more sweetly, most sweetly''). For more details see Adverbs An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by ans ...
and Comparison
Comparison or comparing is the act of evaluating two or more things by determining the relevant, comparable characteristics of each thing, and then determining which characteristics of each are similar to the other, which are different, and t ...
in the English grammar article.
The Libya
Libya, officially the State of Libya, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to Egypt–Libya border, the east, Sudan to Libya–Sudan border, the southeast, Chad to Chad–L ...
n domain, .ly was used for domain hack
A domain hack is a domain name that suggests a word, phrase, or name when concatenating two or more adjacent levels of that domain. For example, and , using the domains ''.bot'' and ''.le'', suggest the words ''robot'' and ''example'' respective ...
s for this suffix.
There are some words that are neither adverbs nor adjectives, and yet end with ''-ly'', such as ''apply'', ''family'', ''supply''. There are also adverbs in English that do not end with ''-ly'', such as ''now'', ''then'', ''tomorrow'', ''today'', ''upstairs'', ''downstairs'', ''yesterday'', ''overseas'', ''behind'', ''already''.
See also
* -ing
''-ing'' is a suffix used to make one of the inflection, inflected forms of English verbs. This verb form is used as a present participle, as a gerund, and sometimes as an independent noun or adjective. The suffix is also found in certain words ...
– the suffix used to form gerund
In linguistics, a gerund ( abbreviated ger) is any of various nonfinite verb forms in various languages; most often, but not exclusively, it is one that functions as a noun. The name is derived from Late Latin ''gerundium,'' meaning "which is ...
s and present tense
* -ed
* -logy
''-logy'' is a suffix in the English language, used with words originally adapted from Ancient Greek ending in ('). The earliest English examples were anglicizations of the French '' -logie'', which was in turn inherited from the Latin '' -l ...
* -ism
''-ism'' () is a suffix in many English grammar, English words, originally derived from the Ancient Greek suffix ('), and reached English language, English through the Latin , and the French language, French . It is used to create abstract noun ...
References
Further reading
*
*
*
*{{citation , url=http://www.web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/why-english-adverbial-ly.pdf , title=Why English adverbial -ly is not inflectional , author= Arnold Zwicky , year=1995
ly
English grammar