seldomly

seldomly

English

Etymology

From Middle English seldomly; equivalent to seldom +‎ -ly.

Adverb

seldomly (comparative more seldomly, superlative most seldomly)

1. (rare, sometimes proscribed) Seldom; rarely.
   • 1864, Ellen L. Biscoe Hollis, The Winthrops, page 265:

     the universally felt, yet seldomly acknowledged truth […]

   • c. 1864, Emily Dickinson, “[Part 5: The Single Hound] So set its sun in thee”, in Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, editors, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, centenary edition, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, and Company, published November 1930, OCLC 729985986, page 268:

     So I the ships may see / That touch how seldomly / Thy shore?

   • 1999, Philip Greenspun, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing:

     Very seldomly will you need to store email addresses or names that are anywhere near as long as 100 characters.

   • 2011, Bart D. Ehrman, The Reliability of the New Testament, p. 132:

     Additionally, orthographic variants only very seldomly affect the text itself.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:rarely

Usage notes

• Sometimes proscribed in favor of the more common seldom, itself an adverb.
• At COCA seldom occurs more than 5,000 times; seldomly 12. It is even rarer in the BNC.

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Middle English

Etymology

From seldom (“uncommon”, adjective) +‎ -ly.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈseːldəmliː/

Adverb

seldomly

1. (rare) seldomly; seldom.

Descendants

• English: seldomly

References

• “sẹ̄ldomlī, adv.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 2018-05-04.