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OneKitly

silently

adverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈsaɪləntli//

In a silent manner; making no noise.

adverb

  1. 1

    In a silent manner; making no noise.

    It often happens that the most important results in the natural world are brought about by causes which operate silently, if not imperceptibly.

    Frederick, I presume, at this late hour of four, may be snatching a morsel of dinner; his orderlies are silently speeding, plans taken, orders given: […]

  2. 2

    Of an edit or change to a text, without explicit acknowledgment.

    There never was an English-language text, either in 1561 or 1859. Yule and Burnell have silently provided a translation.

Etymology

Etymology tree English silent Proto-Indo-European *leyg-der. Proto-Germanic *līkąder. Proto-Germanic *-līkaz Proto-Germanic *-ê Proto-Germanic *-līkê Proto-West Germanic *-līkē Old English -līċe Middle English -ly English -ly English silently From silent + -ly.

Forms

comparative
more silently
superlative
most silently
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).