Regular and Irregular Adverbs  

Adverbs generally correspond to an adjective, so that when we want to apply the adjective’s meaning to a verb (or to an adjective or another adverb), we have a straightforward way to do so. Regular adverbs are formed by adding “-ly” or some variation thereof onto the end of the adjective. Sometimes the adjective’s spelling needs to be altered slightly to accommodate this, but the rules of doing so are fairly straightforward.

Irregular adverbs, on the other hand, are adverbs that are not formed from standard English spelling conventions. Because they do not follow the “rules,” there is no trick to using them: you simply have to memorize them. Here is a table of the most common irregular adverbs and their adjectival counterparts:

First, let’s examine the normal rules for making regular adverbs, and then we’ll examine more closely the irregular adverbs above that do not follow these rules.

Regular adverbs are formed by taking an adjective and adding some form of the suffix “-ly.” Sometimes the spelling of the adjective changes to accommodate this suffix; sometimes the suffix itself must change. As with most spelling rules in English, though, there are exceptions even to these patterns. We’ll look at these rules individually below, and highlight any exceptions to each.

The most straightforward rule is to simply add “-ly” to the end of an adjective, without changing the spelling at all. This occurs when an adjective ends in a consonant (except for “-ic”) or a consonant + “-e” (except for “-le”). For example:

Sometimes the spelling of a word will have to change slightly so as to better accommodate the extra “-ly.” If the adjective ends in “-ic,” for instance, it will become “-ically”:

The one exception to this rule is the adjective public, which becomes the adverb publicly.

If the adjective ends in a “-y,” it is replaced with “-ily”:

For adjectives ending in “-le,” we drop the “e” on the end and replace it with “-y”:

For those ending in “-ue,” the “e” is still dropped but it is replaced instead with “-ly”:

The majority of adverbs end in “-ly,” but as we will see, there are some irregular ones that need to be memorized.

Fast is one of the irregular adverbs—the adjective and the adverb are the same. For example:

“A Ferrari is a fast car.

“He drives fast.”

Hard is another irregular adverb. If we say, “I work hardly,” it could impede understanding. The listener may think you mean, “I hardly work,” which has the opposite meaning (hardly (ever) is a frequency adverb and means “very rarely”). The correct use of hard as an adverb would simply be “I work hard.”

Other exceptions to the spelling rules include straight, lively, late, and early, which all have the same spelling whether they are used as adjectives or as adverbs. For example:

(*Though lively still exists as an adverb in phrases like “step lively,” it is more often used in an adverbial prepositional phrase, as in, “The boys all played in a lively manner.”)

A common source of confusion is the proper use of the words “late” and “lately.” Late, as already mentioned, is both an adjective and an adverb. Lately, on the other hand, is only an adverb of time meaning “recently.” For example:

Timely and friendly are only adjectives. To use these as adverbs, we simply use them in an adverbial prepositional phrase, such as “in a ______ way/manner”:

Adverbs of frequency that deal with specific measures of time and end in “-ly” can function both as adjectives and adverbs. Examples of these include yearly, weekly, daily, and hourly. For instance:

The adjective wrong can become the adverb wrongly, but we can use wrong as an irregular adverb as well—both are acceptable. However, wrong as an adverb must come after the verb it modifies, as in:

Wrongly, on the other hand, can be used either before or after the word it modifies:

Good is an adjective used to describe a noun; well is the adverb derived from good and describes how you do something. For example:

“I speak English good” is incorrect, as we need to use an adverb when describing a verb. In the last example, “I did good” is incorrect because we need an adverb to describe how the speaker did on the exam. The phrase “do good” is especially tricky, because it can also mean “to do good or virtuous deeds.” (Good in this sense is a noun acting as the object of the verb.)

It is important to remember that linking verbs (such as be, become, get, and the sense verbs feel, taste, look, sound, smell, and seem) are followed by predicative adjectives, not adverbs. For example:

Notice that the last two examples are both correct. Not only is well an adverb, but it also functions as an adjective. Its opposite adjective is ill, while the opposite of good is bad. When we say, “You look good,” we are referring to the person’s physical appearance. If, on the other hand, we say, “You look well,” we are referring to the health or well-being of the person. To learn more about adjectives that follow linking verbs, as well as the “good/well” distinction, see the chapter on Predicative Adjectives.