Seriously

How to spell seriously

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce seriously

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does seriously mean?

1. adverbIn a thoughtful, earnest, or grave way, without joking or carelessness.
2. adverbUsed informally to mean genuinely or to a great degree.

Seriously in a sentence

• The manager spoke seriously about the upcoming layoffs.

• The new coffee shop on the corner is seriously good.

• Doctors take chest pain very seriously in older patients.

• That hike left me seriously exhausted by the afternoon.

Where does seriously come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin adjective serius, which meant 'weighty', 'grave', or 'earnest', the opposite of light-hearted or playful. By the medieval period Latin had formed seriosus, and that passed into Old French as serieux before English adopted the adjective 'serious' in the late fifteenth century. The adverb 'seriously' was then built in English in the usual way, by attaching the native ending -ly, which itself comes from an old word meaning 'like' or 'in the manner of'. Over time the word picked up a second, conversational life as an intensifier, much as 'really' and 'truly' did, so that 'seriously good' simply means 'genuinely good'. The spelling trap sits in the middle: the unstressed -ious cluster is easy to slip into '-ous' or '-ius', and the doubled vowel sound hides which letters actually carry it.

How the word is built

• seri- (from Latin serius: grave, earnest)
• -ous (adjective suffix: full of)
• -ly (adverb suffix)