Particularly

How to spell particularly

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce particularly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does particularly mean?

1. adverbTo a special or notable degree; especially.

Particularly in a sentence

• The commute is particularly slow on rainy mornings.

• She was particularly careful with the quarterly figures.

Where does particularly come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This adverb traces back to the Latin noun particula, which literally meant 'a little part' or 'a small portion', itself a diminutive of pars, meaning 'a part'. From particula came the adjective particularis, describing something relating to a single part rather than the whole, and English borrowed the adjective 'particular' through Old French in the 1300s. The adverb 'particularly' was then formed inside English by adding the native -ly ending, and it came to mean 'in a special degree' or 'especially', singling one thing out from the rest. The same particula root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'particle' and 'partial', all of them carrying the sense of a small piece. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle: writers race past the -ticu-lar-ly stretch and drop a syllable, producing the common error 'particuly', so it helps to remember the buried adjective 'particular' before the -ly.

How the word is built

• part (from Latin pars: a part)
• -icul- (diminutive, a little part)
• -ar (adjective suffix)
• -ly (adverb suffix)