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OneKitly

secretly

adverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ˈsiː.kɹɪt.li//
  • //ˈsiː.kɹət.li//

In secret, covertly.

adverb

  1. 1

    In secret, covertly.

    Mary cheated secretly in the test, and never got caught.

    Sometimes her prose hyperventilates ("Once, years ago, his and N.'s love for each other had glowed like phosphorescent fire on the surfaces of their bodies"), and she has a weakness for epiphanies ("There was a man, no longer young, though not yet old, who, traveling alone in northern Europe, began to feel that his soul was being drained slowly, almost secretly from him, drop by drop").

Etymology

Etymology tree English secret Middle English -ly English -ly English secretly From secret + -ly.

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).