Purely vs Scarcely - What's the difference?
purely | scarcely | Related terms |
* 1962 , , Flush Times :
Solely; exclusively; merely, simply.
* 2005 , Owen Bowcott, The Guardian , 8 Apr 2005:
* 2007 , ‘(Helen Brooks)’, His Christmas Bride :
*:"But this meal tonight is not a date, not in the traditional sense. It's purely platonic, I assure you."
Chastely, innocently; in a sinless manner, without fault.
* 1623 , (William Shakespeare), Troilus and Cressida , First Folio, IV.7:
* 1823 , (Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Table Talk :
(modal) Probably not.
(modal) Certainly not.
* 1842 , (William Godwin), ,
* 1869 , , ,
* 1898 , , ,
* 1914 , (Saki), ,
(degree) Almost not at all; by a small margin.
* Washington Irving
* 1875 December 7, , ,
* 1887 , (Arthur Conan Doyle), (A Study in Scarlet) :
* {{quote-book, year=1905, author=
, title=
, chapter=2 * 1922 , (Margery Williams), (The Velveteen Rabbit)
* 1963 , (Pierre Boulle), :
* 1993 , , Joseph Jacobs (translator), The Art of Worldly Wisdom ,
As adverbs the difference between purely and scarcely
is that purely is wholly; really, completely while scarcely is probably not.purely
English
Adverb
(en adverb)- I am fascinated by the entire scene, I purely am.
- The IRA should "lead by example" and "unilaterally" abandon paramilitary violence and adopt a purely political strategy, a leading Sinn Féin MP urged yesterday.
- faith and troth, / Strain'd purely from all hollow bias drawing: / Bids thee with most diuine integritie, / From heart of very heart, great Hector welcome.
- By some means or other the water flows purely , and separated from the filth, in a deeper and narrower course on one side of the rock, and the refuse of the dirt and troubled water goes off on the other in a broader current [...].
scarcely
English
Adverb
(en adverb)- One could scarcely find any trout in the stream without the stocking program.
- One could scarcely expect the man to know how to fly a helicopter.
- He did not enter upon the subject without being aware that government by its very nature counteracts the improvement of individual intellect; but, as the views he entertains in this particular are out of the common road, it is scarcely to be wondered at that he understood the proposition more completely as he proceeded, and saw more distinctly into the nature of the remedy.
- But, of course, this weather had put a stop to every kind of movement; for even if men could have borne the cold, they could scarcely be brought to face the perils of the snow-drifts.
- The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world.
- His clothes could scarcely be called shabby, at least they passed muster in the half-light, but one’s imagination could not have pictured the wearer embarking on the purchase of a half-crown box of chocolates or laying out ninepence on a carnation buttonhole.
- He had scarcely finished, when the labourer arrived who had been sent for my ransom.
- In 1776 manufactories scarcely existed even in name in all this vast territory.
- Scarcely had she got fairly into it, however, before the beasts closed in behind her, and she found herself completely embedded in the moving stream of fierce-eyed long-homed bullocks.
citation, passage=“Scarcely had Alice reached her twentieth birthday, than she gave her erstwhile fiancée [sic] his formal congé. […]”}}
- That night, and for many nights after, the Velveteen Rabbit slept in the Boy’s bed. At first he found it rather uncomfortable, for the Boy hugged him very tight, and sometimes he rolled over on him, and sometimes he pushed him so far under the pillow that the Rabbit could scarcely breathe.
- But we shall take scarcely more than two years to reach it, while we should have needed almost as much time to arrive in the region of Proxima Centauris.
- Nature scarcely ever gives us the very best—for that we must have recourse to art.