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Allin

painfully

adverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈpeɪnfəli//

In a painful manner; as if in pain.

adverb

  1. 1

    In a painful manner; as if in pain.

    I limped painfully down the stairs.

    The unsufficiency and uncandidness of his answer became painfully apparent in the dead silence of the room.

  2. 2

    informalBadly; poorly.

    That was the most painfully sung rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon” that I’ve ever heard.

Etymology

From Middle English peinfully, paynefully, equivalent to painful + -ly.

Forms

comparative
more painfully
superlative
most painfully
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).