Fairly

How to spell fairly

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fairly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fairly mean?

1. adverbTo a moderate or reasonable degree; quite but not extremely.
2. adverbIn a just, honest, or impartial manner.

Fairly in a sentence

• The report was fairly accurate, though a few figures needed checking.

• The manager treated every employee fairly when dividing the workload.

• The commute is fairly short once the morning traffic clears.

• The prizes were distributed fairly among all the contestants.

Where does fairly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on the native English adjective 'fair', which descends from the Old English 'fæger', meaning 'beautiful, pleasing, or attractive'. Over centuries the sense broadened from simply 'pleasing to look at' toward ideas of clearness, justice, and impartiality, so that a 'fair' decision came to mean an even-handed one. The adverb 'fairly' was formed by adding the ordinary Old English ending '-lice' (the ancestor of modern '-ly'), and at first it meant 'beautifully' or 'gently'. By the seventeenth century it had picked up its now-common softening sense of 'moderately' or 'to a reasonable degree', as in 'fairly good'. The straightforward spelling, with the 'air' vowel cluster intact before '-ly', rarely trips writers, since both halves are everyday words in their own right.

How the word is built

• fair (just, moderate)
• -ly (adverb suffix)