Boldly

How to spell boldly

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce boldly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does boldly mean?

1. adverbIn a confident, brave, or fearless manner.

Boldly in a sentence

• She spoke boldly in the meeting, defending her budget proposal.

• The new manager boldly challenged the outdated sales targets.

Where does boldly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends straight from Old English, where the adjective 'beald' meant brave, daring, or confident, a sense that has stayed remarkably stable for more than a thousand years. It belongs to a wide family of Germanic relatives, including the Old High German 'bald', also meaning bold, which shows the word was already old when English first wrote it down. The modern adverb is simply the adjective 'bold' plus the ancient adverb-forming ending '-ly', itself a worn-down form of the Old English '-lice', meaning 'in the manner of'. Because the base ends in a consonant, the '-ly' attaches cleanly with no doubling and no dropped letter, so the spelling trap is mostly remembering that there is just one 'l' in the root and one in the suffix. Curiously, in some old dialects 'bald' could also mean 'soon' or 'quickly', a sense now lost in everyday speech but preserved in a few place names.

How the word is built

• bold (from Old English beald: brave, confident)
• -ly (adverb suffix)