Roughly

How to spell roughly

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce roughly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does roughly mean?

1. adverbUsed to indicate that a number or amount is approximate rather than exact.
2. adverbIn a forceful, harsh, or unrefined way.

Roughly in a sentence

• The journey takes roughly three hours by train.

• He grabbed the box roughly and tossed it onto the truck.

• The repair will cost roughly two hundred pounds.

• The new recruit was treated roughly by the older crew.

Where does roughly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on the adjective 'rough', which descends from the Old English 'ruh', meaning coarse, hairy, or uneven to the touch. That word belongs to a wider Germanic family, with close cousins in the Dutch 'ruig' and the German 'rauh', all carrying the same sense of a bristly or unsmooth surface. The adverb form was made in the usual English way by adding the suffix '-ly', which itself comes from Old English 'lice', meaning 'in the manner of'. Over time the literal idea of an uneven, imprecise surface broadened into the figurative sense of something approximate or not exact, which is why 'roughly' now most often means 'about' or 'approximately'. The spelling preserves the old 'gh', once pronounced as a throaty sound that has long since faded to an 'f' here, leaving the silent-looking cluster that trips writers up.

How the word is built

• rough (from Old English ruh: coarse, hairy, uneven)
• -ly (adverb suffix)