ly
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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2 characters
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "ly", 2-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "ly" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "ly" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
-ly is aEnglishsuffix. It means: Used to form adjectives from nouns, the adjectives having the sense of "behaving like, or having a nature typical of what is denoted by the noun" Similar in meaning to -like but most often paired w... Pronounced /li/.
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See how -ly compares against similar English words.
Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | -ly |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Suffix |
| IPA | /li/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for -ly is 3 letters long, classified as asuffix, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /li/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for -ly in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English -ly, -li, -lik, -lich, -like, from Old English -līċ, from Proto-West Germanic *-līk, from Proto-Germanic *-līkaz (“having the body or form of”), from *līką (“body”) (whence lich). In form, probably influenced by Old Norse -ligr (“-ly”) (… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is -ly, spelled --L-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Used to form adjectives from nouns, the adjectives having the sense of "behaving like, or having a nature typical of what is denoted by the noun" Similar in meaning to -like but most often paired with animate nouns.
- 2Used to form adjectives from nouns, the adjectives having the sense of "appearing like, resembling, or having the likeness of what is denoted by the noun".
- 3Used to form adjectives from nouns specifying time intervals, the adjectives having the sense of "occurring at such intervals".
Etymology
From Middle English -ly, -li, -lik, -lich, -like, from Old English -līċ, from Proto-West Germanic *-līk, from Proto-Germanic *-līkaz (“having the body or form of”), from *līką (“body”) (whence lich). In form, probably influenced by Old Norse -ligr (“-ly”) (Norwegian Bokmål -lig, Faroese -ligur, Icelandic -legur). Cognate with Dutch -lijk, German -lich, Danish -lig and Swedish -lig. Doublet of -like, more at like.
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter - in our English index: