Hardly

How to spell hardly

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hardly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hardly mean?

1. adverbScarcely, barely, or almost not at all.

Hardly in a sentence

• She had hardly slept before the early flight.

• The new clerk could hardly keep up with the orders.

Where does hardly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word hardly grew out of the Old English heardlic and the adverb heardlice, which originally meant 'in a firm or harsh manner', built on heard, the ancestor of modern 'hard', meaning firm, tough, or severe. For centuries the word kept that physical sense of force and effort, as in striking something hardly. From around the late Middle Ages the meaning drifted: 'with difficulty' shaded into 'only with great effort', and from there into the modern sense of 'barely' or 'scarcely', the smallest possible amount. This kind of weakening, where a word for strong effort comes to mean almost nothing at all, is a common path in English. The spelling is straightforward because it simply joins the familiar word hard to the regular adverb ending -ly, with no doubling or dropped letters.

How the word is built

• hard (Old English heard: firm, severe)
• -ly (adverb suffix)