Increasingly

How to spell increasingly

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce increasingly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does increasingly mean?

1. adverbTo a steadily growing degree; more and more as time passes.

Increasingly in a sentence

• Commuters are increasingly choosing the train over driving to work.

• The manager found it increasingly difficult to meet the rising targets.

Where does increasingly come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word builds on the verb 'increase', which English took during the 1300s from the Old French verb 'encreistre', itself descended from the Latin 'increscere', meaning 'to grow in or upon'. That Latin verb joins the prefix 'in-' (into or upon) with 'crescere' (to grow), the same root that gives us 'crescent', 'crescendo', and even 'recruit'. The adverb 'increasingly' was assembled later in English by taking the present participle 'increasing' and adding the familiar '-ly' ending that turns descriptive words into adverbs of manner or degree. By the seventeenth century it had settled into its modern job of signalling that something is happening more and more over time. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the 'ea' vowel of 'creas' is silent in its logic, and writers often want a single 's' where the word in fact keeps just one 's' followed by '-ingly'.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• creas (from crescere: to grow)
• -ing (present participle)
• -ly (adverb suffix)