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OneKitly

sorta

adverbcontractionattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈsɔːtə//
  • United States//ˈsɔɹtə//
  • United States/[-ɾə]/

Sort of.

adverb

  1. 1

    Variant of sort ofinformalContraction of sort of.

    The portraits on the wall aren’t that good, but they’re just sorta cool to have around.

    'Webb,' he says sorta sorrowful like, 'it looks like a howlin' shame to have a bang-up American girl hooked up to a money-grubbin' member of the British nobility. It don't in no way fit in with my ideas of the speerut of American independence!'

    When Tommy's folks heard about it they were angry with him, and with Chuck for using him to play such a mean trick on Vern. In fact the whole thing sorta backfired on old Chuck—and on me and Pete too. Instead of laughing about it, most people thought it was pretty crummy.

Etymology

A written form of a reduction of sort of.

contraction

  1. 1

    informalSort of.

    There’s gotta be some sorta explanation.

    He glanced at her then back at me. "What sorta research?" / "Well, war correspondent might not be too far off," I said.

Forms

plural
sortsa
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).