Vaguely

How to spell vaguely

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce vaguely

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vaguely mean?

1. adverbIn a way that is unclear, imprecise, or only roughly defined.

Vaguely in a sentence

• The witness could only vaguely recall the colour of the car.

• His instructions were so vaguely worded that nobody knew where to begin.

Where does vaguely come from?

Language of origin: French

This adverb is built on the adjective 'vague', which English borrowed in the 1500s from French 'vague', itself descended from the Latin 'vagus', meaning 'wandering', 'roaming', or 'unsettled'. The same Latin root gave us 'vagrant' and 'vagabond', words for people who drift from place to place without a fixed home, and it lends 'vague' its core idea of a meaning that will not settle into anything definite. The silent letters are the spelling trap here: the 'gu' keeps a hard 'g' sound (rather than a soft one), and the original French 'e' on 'vague' is retained even after the '-ly' is added, so the word is written 'vaguely' rather than 'vaguly'. Adding the adverb ending '-ly' simply turns the quality of being unclear into the manner of doing something unclearly, and the word has carried this sense of imprecision in English for several centuries.

How the word is built

• vague (from Latin vagus: wandering, uncertain)
• -ly (adverb suffix)