Enormously

How to spell enormously

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce enormously

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does enormously mean?

1. adverbTo a very great degree; immensely or hugely.

Enormously in a sentence

• The new software made the team enormously more productive.

• Property prices have risen enormously over the past decade.

Where does enormously come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin enormis, which combined ex, meaning 'out of', with norma, the word for a carpenter's square and, by extension, a rule or standard; so something enormis was literally 'out of the norm', that is, irregular or beyond the ordinary measure. English took it in through the related French enorme during the 1500s, and at first 'enormous' could carry the negative sense of monstrous or outrageous before settling into its modern meaning of simply very large. The adverb 'enormously' was then built by adding the familiar -ly ending. The same norma root sits quietly inside everyday words like 'norm', 'normal', and 'abnormal', which is a handy reminder that the heart of the word is spelled n-o-r-m. Because the second syllable is stressed and the rest reduces to soft schwa sounds, the trap is the unstressed '-mously' ending rather than the clear 'norm' in the middle.

How the word is built

• e- (from Latin ex-, out of)
• norm (from norma, rule or standard)
• -ous (full of)
• -ly (adverb suffix)