Strongly

How to spell strongly

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce strongly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does strongly mean?

1. adverbIn a powerful, forceful, or emphatic manner; to a great degree.

Strongly in a sentence

• The committee strongly recommended approving the budget.

• The coffee smelled strongly of roasted beans.

Where does strongly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from the native Old English adjective 'strang', meaning powerful, firm, or vigorous, joined to the productive adverb-forming ending '-lice', which gave modern English '-ly'. The root 'strang' belonged to the core Germanic vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxons and has cousins in German 'streng' (strict) and Dutch 'streng', all carrying a sense of being tight, taut, or firmly held. Over time the vowel softened in pronunciation to give the modern 'strong', while the adverb simply layers '-ly' onto the unchanged adjective, which is why the spelling keeps both the 'g' of 'strong' and the full '-ly'. Because the word splits so cleanly into 'strong' plus 'ly', it rarely causes trouble: there is no doubled letter or dropped vowel to trip a writer.

How the word is built

• strong (root: powerful, forceful)
• -ly (adverb suffix)