Unnecessarily

How to spell unnecessarily

13 letters · 6 syllables

How to pronounce unnecessarily

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does unnecessarily mean?

1. adverbIn a way that is not needed or could have been avoided.

Unnecessarily in a sentence

• The report was unnecessarily long, repeating the same figures three times.

• He worried unnecessarily about a deadline that had already been extended.

Where does unnecessarily come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This adverb traces back to the Latin necesse, meaning 'needful' or 'unavoidable', a word built from ne 'not' and the root cedere 'to yield or give way', so that something necessary was literally something that would not yield or could not be set aside. From necesse came the Latin adjective necessarius, 'indispensable', which English absorbed through Old French as 'necessary' during the 1300s. The opposite was formed in English by attaching the native negative prefix un- to 'necessary', and the adverb 'unnecessarily' followed by adding the regular -ly ending. The spelling traps are stacked here: the doubled n appears because the un- prefix meets a root that already begins with n, and the doubled s sits inside the Latin root necesse. Many adults also stumble on the -arily ending, which keeps the a of 'necessary' even though the stressed vowel is barely heard, making this one of the longer everyday words that quietly invites error.

How the word is built

• un- (not)
• necess- (from Latin necesse: needful, unavoidable)
• -ary (adjective suffix)
• -ly (adverb suffix)