Unlawfully

How to spell unlawfully

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce unlawfully

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does unlawfully mean?

1. adverbIn a way that breaks the law; without legal right or permission.

Unlawfully in a sentence

• The company was found to have unlawfully withheld wages from its staff.

• The tenants claimed they had been unlawfully evicted from the flat.

Where does unlawfully come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built entirely from native English and Old Norse parts. The core noun 'law' came into Old English as 'lagu' from the Old Norse 'lög', the plural of 'lag', which literally meant something 'laid down' or 'fixed'; the same idea of laying down a rule survives in the modern word. To that core English added the adjective ending '-ful', meaning 'full of' or 'in keeping with', producing 'lawful', recorded from the 1300s. The negating prefix 'un-', one of the oldest and most productive Old English prefixes, simply reverses the sense to 'not lawful'. Finally the adverb suffix '-ly' was attached to describe how an action is performed. The spelling trap lives at the join of '-ful' and '-ly': the single 'l' of '-ful' plus the 'l' of '-ly' produce the double 'l' in '-fully', which writers often reduce by mistake to '-fuly'.

How the word is built

• un- (not)
• law (a body of rules)
• -ful (full of, characterised by)
• -ly (adverb suffix)