Scarcely

How to spell scarcely

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce scarcely

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scarcely mean?

1. adverbOnly just; almost not at all; hardly.

Scarcely in a sentence

• She had scarcely enough money to cover the rent that month.

• The road was so foggy he could scarcely see the car ahead.

Where does scarcely come from?

Language of origin: French

Scarcely is the adverb formed from the adjective scarce, which English borrowed in the 1200s from Old French scars or escars, meaning 'sparing', 'stingy', or 'in short supply'. That Old French word traces back to a Vulgar Latin form escarpsus, an alteration of excerptus, the past participle of excerpere 'to pluck out' or 'to pick out' (the same root that gives us 'excerpt'); the underlying idea was something thinned out or selected away, leaving little behind. By the time the -ly suffix was added, scarcely had come to mean 'barely' or 'only just', describing an amount or degree so small it hardly counts. The spelling trap is the silent stretch in the middle: writers must keep the -ce- of scarce before adding -ly, so the word ends -cely rather than the phonetically tempting -sly. Holding the parent word scarce in mind is the surest way to spell scarcely correctly.

How the word is built

• scarce (from Old French escars: sparing, scanty)
• -ly (adverb suffix)