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Thirty-seven Adjectives Ending in -ly

You all know (or you will at least pretend you do if you know what’s good for you) that an adjective describes a noun or pronoun, while an adverb describes a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. The quick and dirty way to tell between the two parts of speech is to look for the -ly ending: most adverbs end in -ly, and most words ending in -ly are adverbs.

As always, there are exceptions. The list below is concerned only with the false positives (“Type II errors” to all you statisticians out there) which crop up when an adjective, waggling its -ly tail, tries to masquerade as an adverb. The two examples I’ve commonly heard are “lovely” and “friendly.”

When I spot one of these little buggers, I chuckle inwardly (because I’m a dork) and add it to my mental list. Thing is, I can never find that flingin-flangin list when I need it, so about a week ago I started writing them down. I thought of seven or eight right away, then kept adding to it a couple at a time until I got to 37 earlier today. I didn’t think it would go this fast, but I guess there are a bunch of them out there.

I excluded certain categories of words I felt weren’t “fair”, like slang (bully, fugly), hyphenated words (touchy-feely), and words whose legitimacy I couldn’t confirm without a dictionary (warbly, marbly).

I’ve hidden the list itself in case you’d like to play along. If I could think of 37 in just a week, there are sure to be a least a couple hundred more floating around out there. Feel free to leave new words in the comments if you come up with ones that aren’t in my 37.

  1. lovely
  2. orderly
  3. lonely
  4. homely
  5. curmudgeonly
  6. prickly
  7. stately
  8. bubbly
  9. comely
  10. portly
  11. shapely
  12. ugly
  13. sickly
  14. crinkly
  15. spindly
  16. friendly
  17. manly
  18. womanly
  19. deadly
  20. sly
  21. courtly
  22. spritely
  23. wriggly
  24. squiggly
  25. dastardly
  26. jolly
  27. wrinkly
  28. wily
  29. woolly
  30. mealy
  31. crumbly
  32. hilly
  33. silly
  34. frilly
  35. chilly
  36. sparkly
  37. curly

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 13th, 2005 at 12:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Thirty-seven Adjectives Ending in -ly”

  1. Shannon Says:
    October 13th, 2005 at 1:44 am

    Umm … this is what I see:

    Testing

    This is the first line.

    And this part is hidden.

  2. Natalie Says:
    October 13th, 2005 at 1:55 am

    Yup. I was testing the “more” command to make sure I could hide things. Hence the title. I thought I’d published it as “private,” but I guess not. At any rate, the real post is up now.

  3. Natalie Says:
    October 13th, 2005 at 7:43 am

    Ok, as I was going to sleep last night I thought of a whole slew of rhyming ones, so I’ll add them myself.

    early burly pearly swirly squirrelly girly SURLY!

    (Heh, that makes me surly. Maybe two of you will remember why this is funny.)

    And worldly, which nearly rhymes. I was going to include churly (= churlish), but (per Google) it’s used exceedingly rarely. Pity.

  4. Jay Says:
    October 14th, 2005 at 1:43 pm

    Surly Boyd, huh? .. and a certain jackass being pulled out of class – ahh the days …

  5. Robin Says:
    April 27th, 2010 at 11:03 am

    You forgot deadly.

  6. Natalie Says:
    April 27th, 2010 at 11:23 am

    @Robin: See #19.

  7. Robin Says:
    April 27th, 2010 at 11:24 am

    Sorry – you forgot heavenly.

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