highly
adverb
Form of high , adverb of high.
Simple meaning
In a high or esteemed way.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
hyleeSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈhaɪli
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
adverb
In a high or esteemed manner.
Extremely; greatly; very much.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- A1 · Beginner (estimated)
- Frequency
- Very Common
- Typical Use
- Everyday English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: In a high or esteemed manner.
Used this way, highly is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- No strong connotation
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use highly
- “Details known by only a few highly placed persons.”adverb
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
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Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
Greater than normal in degree or intensity or amount.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
Title used to address a royal person.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
A combination of protease inhibitors taken with reverse transcriptase inhibitors.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.