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PlainSpell

gaily

gai·ly/ˈɡeɪli/adverb

gaily is an adverb meaning “Merrily” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled G-A-I-L-Y and has 2 syllables (gai·ly), and it appears about once in every 6 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does gaily mean?

adverb

  1. 1

    datedMerrily.

  2. 2

    datedShowily.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce gaily?

  • /ˈɡeɪli/

Gaily has 2 syllables, split gai·ly in writing.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-gaily.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of gaily

  • more gaily comparative
  • most gaily superlative

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is gaily?

Gaily appears about once in every 6 million words in written English, the 74,980th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Gaily in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense merrily:

LanguageWords
Frenchgaiement

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does gaily come from?

From gay + -ly.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).