Exceptionally

How to spell exceptionally

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce exceptionally

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does exceptionally mean?

1. adverbTo an unusually great degree; in a way that goes beyond the normal standard.

Exceptionally in a sentence

• The candidate was exceptionally well prepared for the interview.

• The summer has been exceptionally dry this year.

Where does exceptionally come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word builds on the Latin verb excipere, meaning literally 'to take out', formed from ex 'out' and capere 'to take'. From excipere came the noun exceptio, describing something taken out of a general rule, which passed through Old French into English in the late 1300s as 'exception'. English then layered native English suffixes onto that base: the adjective 'exceptional' (something that forms an exception, hence unusual) appeared in the early 1800s, and adding the adverbial '-ly' produced 'exceptionally'. The same capere root sits inside a crowd of everyday relatives such as 'accept', 'capture' and 'receive', all carrying the idea of taking. The spelling trap is the quiet middle, '-cep-' sounded as 'sep', plus the long unstressed tail '-tionally', where writers often drop a syllable or muddle the '-ally' ending.

How the word is built

• ex- (out)
• cept (from Latin capere: to take)
• -ion (noun-forming)
• -al (adjective-forming)
• -ly (adverb-forming)