Mysteriously

How to spell mysteriously

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce mysteriously

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mysteriously mean?

1. adverbIn a way that is difficult to understand, explain, or account for.

Mysteriously in a sentence

• The funds mysteriously vanished from the account overnight.

• The old clock mysteriously started ticking again after years of silence.

Where does mysteriously come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word traces back to the Greek mysterion, which meant a secret rite or hidden truth revealed only to initiates of a religious cult; the related verb muein meant 'to close the lips or eyes', capturing the idea of secrecy and silence. Latin took this in as mysterium, and Old French passed it along as mistere before English settled on 'mystery' in the 1300s. From the noun grew the adjective 'mysterious' in the 1500s, meaning full of mystery or hard to explain, and adding the adverb suffix -ly produced 'mysteriously'. A memorable quirk of the spelling is the 'y' in the first syllable doing the work of a Greek upsilon, and the fact that the 'y' in 'mystery' turns into an 'i' when the -ous and -ly suffixes pile on. The same mysterion root also lies behind 'mystic' and 'mystify', all of them carrying that ancient sense of something deliberately concealed.

How the word is built

• myster- (from Greek mysterion: secret rite, hidden thing)
• -ous (full of)
• -ly (adverb suffix)