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OneKitly

positively

adverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈpɒz.ɪ.tɪv.li//
  • United States//ˈpɑ.zɪ.tɪv.li//

In a positive manner.

adverb

  1. 1

    In a positive manner.

    He approached the interview positively.

    There’s nothing – not. one. thing. – that Trump could do or say that would be received positively by TDSers.

  2. 2

    With certainty.

    I will positively be there at 8 a.m.

    The carriage nearly overturned, and he saw her eyes blaze at him, and she positively hissed, “I suppose you are enjoying this?”

  3. 3

    Absolutely; utterly.

    […] Easter Sunday, for all its traditions, is a gladless day in London. There is positively nothing to do.

    She talked and laughed and positively forgot until he had come in (just as she had imagined) that Pearl Fulton had not turned up.

    "Positively do not open," reads the message under the cabinet in which Ed and Lorraine put the possessed Annabelle doll.

  4. 4

    Very.

    I had a positively wonderful time.

    The half-dozen pieces […] were painted white and carved with festoons of flowers, birds and cupids. […] The bed was the most extravagant piece. Its graceful cane halftester rose high towards the cornice and was so festooned in carved white wood that the effect was positively insecure, as if the great couch were trimmed with icing sugar.

    In the 90s it was Craigslist and AOL chat rooms, then Match.com and Kiss.com. But the lengthy, heartfelt e-mails exchanged by the main characters in You’ve Got Mail (1998) seem positively Victorian in comparison to the messages sent on the average dating app today.

Etymology

From Middle English positively, equivalent to positive + -ly.

Forms

comparative
more positively
superlative
most positively
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).