Visually

How to spell visually

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce visually

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does visually mean?

1. adverbIn a way relating to sight or appearance; as perceived by the eyes.

Visually in a sentence

• The report is dense, so the team made the data more visually appealing with charts.

• The two products are visually identical but differ in price.

Where does visually come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb videre, meaning 'to see', and in particular its past participle stem vis-, which appears in visus, 'sight' or 'the act of seeing'. From that stem Latin formed visualis, an adjective relating to vision, which passed into late Middle English through Old French as 'visual' in the 1400s. The adverb 'visually' was built later on English soil by adding the regular suffix -ly to mean 'in a way perceived by sight' or 'with regard to appearance'. The same productive vis- root supplies a whole family of relatives such as 'vision', 'visible', 'visit', and 'television', all of which involve seeing in some sense. The spelling trap sits in the middle: the unstressed -ual- syllable is easy to slur, so writers sometimes drop the second u or the second l, but it is simply the adjective 'visual' plus '-ly' with no letters lost.

How the word is built

• vis- (from Latin videre, vis-: to see)
• -u-
• -al (adjective suffix)
• -ly (adverb suffix)