Calmly
adverbIn a quiet, controlled way, without anxiety or haste.
How to spell calmly
6 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce calmly
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does calmly mean?
- adverbIn a quiet, controlled way, without anxiety or haste.
Calmly in a sentence
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She answered the difficult question calmly and clearly.
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The pilot calmly explained the delay to the worried passengers.
Where does calmly come from?
Language of origin: Greek
This word is the adverb of 'calm', which arrived in English in the late 1300s through Old French 'calme' and Italian 'calma'. Behind those forms lies a more surprising origin: the Greek 'kauma', meaning the burning heat of the day. In the Mediterranean world the hottest hours were the time when people rested and the sea grew still, so the idea of 'heat of midday' slid naturally into the idea of stillness and quiet. Latin then reshaped the word and passed it through the Romance languages before English took it up. The adverb 'calmly' simply adds the everyday suffix '-ly' to that base, and the spelling preserves the silent 'l' that hides in the parent word, which is the main thing that trips writers up.
How the word is built
- calm (still, free from agitation)
- -ly (adverb-forming suffix)
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