Marginally

How to spell marginally

10 letters · 4 syllables

2 of the 49 people asked to spell marginally in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce marginally

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does marginally mean?

1. adverbTo a small or slight extent; only just.

Marginally in a sentence

• The new model is marginally faster than the old one.

• Sales improved only marginally over the quarter.

Where does marginally come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This adverb traces back to the Latin noun margo, with its stem margin-, which simply meant 'edge', 'border', or 'rim'. In medieval Latin margo came to describe the blank space along the edge of a written page, and English took the noun 'margin' from this source in the late 1300s. From the noun grew the adjective 'marginal', meaning 'in or near the margin', and over time this acquired the figurative sense of something small, slight, or only just within a limit. The adverb 'marginally' was formed by adding the usual English ending '-ly', and it came into common use meaning 'to a small extent' or 'barely'. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the silent unstressed vowel and the chain of endings (-al plus -ly) make it easy to drop a letter or to write 'marginaly' with a single 'l'.

How the word is built

• margin (edge, border)
• -al (adjective suffix)
• -ly (adverb suffix)