painfully

«painfully» in Mova's school dictionary: in a way that hurts or causes pain — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 1 sentence of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

adverb (painfully)

meaning for a pupil

1) Painfully means in a way that hurts or causes pain. tree →

2) Painfully means very, so much that it is uncomfortable: painfully slow, painfully shy. tree →

sense in the lessons

In stories and everyday talk it intensifies: «painfully obvious» means extremely obvious, often embarrassingly. In health: «he walked painfully» shows an injury. Phrases: «painfully slow», «painfully shy», «painfully obvious», «painfully aware».

examples

• He limped painfully off the pitch. tree →
• The queue moved painfully slowly. tree →
• She was painfully shy on her first day. tree →
• It was painfully obvious that he had not done his homework. tree →
• My sunburn felt painfully hot. tree →
• The old dog climbed the stairs painfully. tree →
• So he pretended he was lame, and began to hobble painfully. tree →

note

From «painful» + «-ly»: two «l»s in «painfully». Often goes before an adjective to mean «very» in an unpleasant way.

In the corpora

• Soil grows painfully slowly: a few centimetres can take hundreds to a thousand years.

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «painfully» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.