Badly

How to spell badly

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce badly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does badly mean?

1. adverbIn a poor, unsatisfactory, or unskilful manner.
2. adverbTo a great or severe degree; very much.

Badly in a sentence

• The report was badly written and had to be redone.

• She wanted the promotion badly enough to work every weekend.

• The project was managed so badly that it ran months late.

• The old roof was badly damaged after the storm.

Where does badly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The core word 'bad' is one of the more mysterious words in English, since its origin is genuinely uncertain; it appears in Middle English as 'badde' around the 1200s, but no clear ancestor survives in earlier Old English texts. One plausible thread links it to the Old English 'baeddel', a derogatory term for an effeminate or worthless man, whose meaning could have been softened and broadened into the general sense of 'poor in quality'. The adverb 'badly' was then formed in the ordinary English way by adding the suffix '-ly', which descends from the Old English '-lice' meaning roughly 'in the manner of', the same ending that turns 'quick' into 'quickly' and 'slow' into 'slowly'. Over the centuries 'badly' developed a second, more emphatic sense of 'very much' or 'to a great degree', as in wanting something badly, where the original idea of harm or deficiency has faded into pure intensity. Because both halves of the word are short and phonetically regular, the spelling holds no real trap; it simply pairs the everyday adjective with its standard adverb ending.

How the word is built

• bad (adjective: poor, of low quality)
• -ly (adverb-forming suffix, from Old English -lice 'in the manner of')