Used to formadjectives fromnouns, the adjectives having the sense of "behavinglike, or having anaturetypical of what is denoted by the noun" Similar in meaning to-like but most often paired with animate nouns.
Used to form adjectives from nouns, the adjectives having the sense of "appearinglike,resembling, or having thelikeness of what is denoted by the noun".
In prescriptive usage, derived adverbs in-ly are often preferred to those which are identical in form to the base adjective (e.g.,badly instead ofbad), despite the fact that the latter have been in continuous use since the earliest stages of the language and represent the norm in languages closely related to English, such as Dutch and German. This is the cause of hypercorrections such asI feel badly (wherefeel actually represents acopular verb, which traditionally requires an adjectival complement rather than an adverb).
Various sound changes and spelling changes occur for-ly:
If an adjective ends with a consonant followed byy, it changes intoi before adding the suffix (e.g.ready >readily,easy >easily). Speakers who pronounce final unstressed-y as/i/ replace this vowel sound with/ɪ/ or/ə/ before-ly.
If an adjective ends with-ary, the stress is often moved to the-a- in the derived adjective in-arily.
If an adjective ends withll, onel drops out to avoid a triple letter (e.g.full >fully,shrill >shrilly). The pronunciation may or may not be simplified to have a single/l/ sound: this is normal in frequent words such asfully, but less frequent words such asshrilly may be pronounced with double/ll/.
If an adjective ends with a syllabic/l̩/ (spelled-le after a consonant), euphony causes the-le to drop out. Examples include-ably and-ibly, but alsonoble >nobly,ample >amply, andidle >idly, among others.
For many speakers ofnon-rhotic accents, if this suffix is appended to words in-lar/lə/, the resulting sequence/ləli/~/ləlɪ/ may behaplologically simplified to/li/~/ləlɪ/, resulting in pronunciations of words likeparticularly andregularly such as/pəˈtɪkjəli/,/ˈɹɛɡjəli/ (as if spelt*particuly and*reguly). This is especially common in colloquial speech and for frequently-used words, sospecularly is usually something like/ˈspɛkjələli/, not */ˈspɛkjəli/.
Adjectives ending in-ic generally take-all (public >publicly being an exception).
If an adjective ends with-ed, the pronunciation is sometimes changed from /d/ or /t/ to /ɪd/ before-ly. For example,deserved/dɪˈzɜː(ɹ)vd/ anddeservedly/dɪˈzɜː(ɹ)vɪdli/.
As with its adjectival equivalent,-ly is generally the most common variant of this suffix, though in some words, other variants may be more common, such as-lich(e).
