Dramatically

How to spell dramatically

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce dramatically

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dramatically mean?

1. adverbIn a sudden, striking, or markedly noticeable way.

Dramatically in a sentence

• House prices rose dramatically over the past decade.

• Her health improved dramatically after the new treatment.

Where does dramatically come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word reaches back to the Greek drama, which literally meant 'a deed' or 'an action' and came to mean a staged play, drawn from the verb dran, 'to do' or 'to act'. The Greeks formed the adjective dramatikos for anything 'concerning the stage', and this passed into Late Latin as dramaticus before arriving in English. By the 1600s English had 'dramatic' for things relating to theatre, and the extended sense of 'sudden, striking, or sensational' grew naturally from the heightened emotion of the stage. The adverb 'dramatically' simply stacks the familiar adverb ending -ly onto 'dramatical', an older variant of 'dramatic'. The spelling trap lives in that ending: because we pronounce it as if it were 'dramaticly', writers often drop the -al-, but the word is built on 'dramatical', so the full -ically must stay.

How the word is built

• dramat- (stem of Greek drama: action, deed)
• -ic (adjective)
• -al (adjective)
• -ly (adverb)