Automatically

How to spell automatically

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce automatically

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does automatically mean?

1. adverbIn a way that happens by itself, without conscious thought or manual control.

Automatically in a sentence

• The heating switches on automatically when the room cools below a set point.

• After years of practice, she signs her name automatically without looking.

Where does automatically come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the ancient Greek automatos, meaning 'acting of its own will' or 'self-moving', which was formed from autos, meaning 'self', joined to a root connected with thinking and willing (the same family that gives us 'mental'). The Greeks used a related noun, automaton, for a self-operating contrivance, and that word passed through Latin into English in the 1600s for self-moving machines. By the 1700s scientists and engineers had built the adjective 'automatic' to describe anything that works by itself without conscious control, and the adverb 'automatically' followed naturally. The reason the spelling trips people up is the ending: it is built on 'automatical' plus '-ly', so it keeps the full '-ically' string rather than the tempting but wrong '-icly'. Remembering the hidden adjective 'automatical' explains why that extra 'al' belongs there.

How the word is built

• auto- (self)
• mat (from Greek matos: willing, self-acting)
• -ic (adjective)
• -al (adjective)
• -ly (adverb)