nearly

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for nearly is 6 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈnɪəlɪ/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,091 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for nearly, with forms such as "enarly", "naerly", and "nealry". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 12 confusable-pair relationships, "newly", "nerdy", "nelly", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From near + -ly. Cognate with Scots nerelie, neirlie (“nearly”). Compare also English nearling, nearlings. 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 nearly, spelled N-E-A-R-L-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.