- Now Rare
- with effort or difficulty
- severely; harshly
- only just; barely; scarcely: often used ironically or politely to mean “not quite,” or “not at all”: hardly the person to ask
Origin of hardly
Middle English hardliche from Old English heardlice
adverb
Hardly is defined as barely, scarcely or not likely.
An example of hardly used as an adverb is in the sentence, "He was hardly helping us to complete the project," which means "He was barely helping us to complete the project."
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hardly
Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fifth Edition Copyright © 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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hardly
adverb
- To almost no degree; barely at all; almost not: I could hardly hear the speaker.
- Probably or surely not: He is hardly the kind of guy you would want to date. It's hardly a secret that they are engaged.
- With great difficulty or effort: I could hardly get up the stairs.
- With severity; harshly: “The winter months would deal hardly with many of these poor folk” ( William Black )
Origin of hardly
Middle English hardli from Old English heardlīce harshly, bravely from heard hard ; see hard .Usage Note: In Standard English, hardly, scarcely, and similar adverbs cannot be used with a negative. The sentence I couldn't hardly see him, for instance, is not acceptable. This violation of the double negative rule is curious because these adverbs are not truly negative in meaning. Rather, they minimize the state or event they describe. Thus hardly means “almost not at all,” rarely means “practically never,” and so forth. The sentence Mary hardly laughed means that Mary did laugh a little, not that she kept from laughing altogether, and therefore does not express a negative proposition. But adverbs like hardly and scarcely do share some important features of negative adverbs, even though they may not have purely negative meaning. For one thing, they combine with any and at all, which are characteristically associated with negative contexts. Thus we say I hardly saw him at all or I never saw him at all but not I occasionally saw him at all. Similarly, we say I hardly had any time or I didn't have any time but not I had any time and so on. Like other negative adverbs, hardly triggers inversion of the subject and auxiliary verb when it begins a sentence. Thus we say Hardly had I arrived when she left on the pattern of Never have I read such a book. • Hardly and other minimizing adverbs are properly followed by when and not than in sentences like I had hardly walked inside [when/than] it began to rain. In our 2008 survey, 79 percent of the Usage Panel rejected the use of than in the previous sentence. See Usage Note at double negative. See Usage Note at rarely. See Usage Note at scarcely.
THE AMERICAN HERITAGE® DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, FIFTH EDITION by the Editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries. Copyright © 2016, 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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"Hardly." YourDictionary. LoveToKnow. www.yourdictionary.com/HARDLY.
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Hardly. (n.d.). In YourDictionary. Retrieved from https://www.yourdictionary.com/HARDLY
Adverb
(comparative more hardly, superlative most hardly)
Usage notes
In the sense "barely", it is grammatically a negative word. It therefore collocates with ever rather than never.
- Compare example sentence with I almost never watch television
Interjection
- Not really.
- I think the Beatles are a really overrated band. ― Hardly!
English Wiktionary. Available under CC-BY-SA license.
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MLA Style
"Hardly." YourDictionary. LoveToKnow. www.yourdictionary.com/HARDLY.
APA Style
Hardly. (n.d.). In YourDictionary. Retrieved from https://www.yourdictionary.com/HARDLY
Sentence Examples
- I can hardly wait for the fun to begin!
- He hardly knew how it tasted.
- Hardly had they spoken these words when the door opened and Arion himself stood before them.
- I believe that I have hardly begun yet to know what is possible.
- I could hardly believe it.
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