Skip to content
OneKitly

desperately

adverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ˈdɛs.p(ə.)ɹət.li//

In a desperate manner; without regard to danger or safety; recklessly.

adverb

  1. 1

    In a desperate manner; without regard to danger or safety; recklessly.

    She desperately grabbed at the nearby branches as she heard the branch she was standing on start to snap.

    I could desperately do with some coffee right now.

    I just need you miserably Broken man come to me I just need you desperately Just want to change your mind

    The patient, who lumbers painfully, has a question: She desperately wants a knee replacement, but doesn’t understand why three doctors have rejected her. Ms. Purdie translates doctorspeak.

  2. 2

    extremely

    The race for silver medal was desperately close, they needed a photo finish to separate the runners.

    They would be surprised to discover that we're all actually fighting for the same thing; that is, the sacredness of human love. The trouble is, they have almost every one of their facts totally and desperately wrong. Those who would lecture us on the "immorality" of our lives don't know the first thing about how we actually live them.

Etymology

Etymology tree English desperate Middle English -ly English -ly English desperately From desperate + -ly.

Forms

comparative
more desperately
superlative
most desperately
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).