Cheaply

How to spell cheaply

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cheaply

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cheaply mean?

1. adverbAt a low price, or in a way that costs or suggests little value.

Cheaply in a sentence

• The furniture was made cheaply and fell apart within a year.

• You can travel cheaply if you book the train tickets months in advance.

Where does cheaply come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on the adjective 'cheap', which goes back to the Old English noun 'ceap', meaning a bargain, a trade, or a price paid for goods. That noun was itself borrowed in early Germanic times from the Latin 'caupo', meaning a small trader or innkeeper, the same root that lies behind place names like Chepstow and the London street Cheapside, which were once busy market areas. For centuries 'cheap' was a noun and verb about buying and selling, and only in the 1500s did it settle into the modern adjective sense of 'costing little'. Adding the standard adverb suffix '-ly' produced 'cheaply', describing the manner in which something is done at low cost or in a way that suggests low value. Because the base word ends in '-p' rather than a silent or doubled letter, the spelling stays simple: cheap plus ly, with no dropped or added letters.

How the word is built

• cheap (low in price, from Old English ceap: a bargain or trade)
• -ly (adverb-forming suffix)