Weekly

How to spell weekly

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce weekly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does weekly mean?

1. adjectiveHappening or produced once every week.
2. adverbOnce every week; at intervals of one week.
3. nounA newspaper or magazine published once a week.

Weekly in a sentence

• adjective

  The team holds a weekly meeting every Monday morning.

• adverb

  The cleaning staff service the offices weekly on Thursdays.

• noun

  The local weekly ran the council story on its front page.

• adjective

  She subscribes to a weekly magazine that arrives each Friday.

• adverb

  Contractors are paid weekly rather than monthly.

• noun

  He wrote a gardening column for a regional weekly for years.

Where does weekly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word joins the noun 'week' to the suffix '-ly', both of which are native to English rather than borrowed. 'Week' descends from Old English 'wicu' or 'wice', which referred to the seven-day cycle and is related to a Germanic root carrying the sense of turning or succession, the idea of one period giving way to the next. The suffix '-ly' comes from Old English '-lic', originally meaning 'having the form or body of', and over time it settled into two jobs: forming adjectives and, in the time sense, marking something that recurs at regular intervals. By the late medieval period 'weekly' was established to mean 'happening once each week'. The crucial spelling point is that the first syllable keeps the 'ee' of 'week', not the 'ea' of its sound-alike 'weakly', which is built instead on the unrelated word 'weak'.

How the word is built

• week (a period of seven days)
• -ly (adjective/adverb suffix meaning 'every' or 'recurring at intervals')

Words that sound like weekly

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• weakly: In a feeble manner; without strength or force.