wildly
part of speech
adverb (wildly, more wildly, most wildly)
meaning for a pupil
1) Wildly means in a wild, uncontrolled way, with lots of excited or fierce movement. tree →
2) Wildly means very much or extremely: «wildly popular», «wildly wrong». tree →
3) A wildly growing plant grows freely, without anyone looking after it. tree →
sense in the lessons
In stories it shows strong feeling or chaos: a crowd cheering wildly, a heart beating wildly, a dog barking wildly. In maths and science it describes a guess or number far from the truth: «a wildly wrong estimate», «temperatures changed wildly». Phrases: «cheer wildly», «wave wildly», «wildly different», «wildly popular».
examples
- The crowd cheered wildly when we scored. tree →
- My heart was beating wildly before the race. tree →
- He waved his arms wildly to get our attention. tree →
- The dog barked wildly at the postman. tree →
- Her guess of 5,000 was wildly wrong. tree →
- The weather changed wildly from sunny to stormy. tree →
- Flowers grew wildly along the old railway. tree →
- The new game is wildly popular at our school. tree →
- And the horse galloped on more wildly than before. tree →
note
An adverb from «wild». Trap: «wildly» before an adjective usually means «extremely», not «in a wild way»: «wildly expensive» = very expensive. In maths, a wildly wrong answer is a sign to check the estimate and the working.
In the corpora
- Well might the ferrets rush wildly for the fireplace and get hopelessly jammed in the chimney!»
- Doubling grows wildly: fold paper and the layers go 2, 4, 8, 16...
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «wildly» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.