Neatly

How to spell neatly

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce neatly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does neatly mean?

1. adverbIn a tidy, careful, and orderly manner.

Neatly in a sentence

• She folded the laundry neatly and stacked it in the drawer.

• The report was neatly typed and free of stray marks.

Where does neatly come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base word neat reached English in the sixteenth century from the Old French net, meaning 'clean, clear, or pure', which itself descended from the Latin nitidus, 'gleaming, bright, well groomed'. That Latin adjective came from the verb nitere, meaning 'to shine', so the earliest flavour of the word was less about tidiness and more about a polished, glossy brightness. As English absorbed it, the sense settled into 'clean, trim, and orderly', and the spelling later split: 'net' kept the financial sense of an amount with nothing extra added, while 'neat' carried the tidiness sense. The adverb 'neatly' was then formed in the ordinary native way by adding the Germanic suffix -ly, which marks manner. The same shining ancestor survives in the word 'nitid', a rare term still used for anything glossy or lustrous.

How the word is built

• neat (clean, tidy, from Latin nitidus 'bright, shining')
• -ly (adverb suffix)