Lovely

How to spell lovely

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lovely

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lovely mean?

1. adjectiveBeautiful, delightful, or very pleasant.

Lovely in a sentence

• The garden looked lovely after the spring rain.

• They spent a lovely afternoon walking along the coast.

Where does lovely come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Lovely comes from the Old English luflic, which combined lufu, meaning 'love' or 'affection', with the suffix -lic, the ancestor of modern -ly. In its earliest use it carried the sense of 'loving' or 'affectionate', describing someone full of love rather than someone pleasant to look at. Over the medieval period the meaning gradually shifted outward, from the love a person feels to the qualities in a thing that inspire love, giving us the modern sense of 'beautiful' or 'delightful'. The same lufu root sits inside the plain word 'love' itself, which is the reassuring key to the spelling: lovely is simply love with the silent final e dropped before the -ly ending. Because that e disappears, many writers pause over whether to keep it, but the rule that a final silent e is lost before a consonant suffix keeps the spelling tidy.

How the word is built

• love (from Old English lufu: affection)
• -ly (adjective suffix meaning 'having the quality of')