Word.ws English Dictionary

dearnly

dearnly is the alternative form of dernly.

Meaning of dernly

Adverb

dernly (comparative more dernly, superlative most dernly)

  1. (obsolete) Secretly.
  2. (obsolete) Sternly, imposingly.
    • next stroke him should haue slaine, / Had not the Lady, which by him stood bound, / Dernely vnto her called to abstaine […]1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto XII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  3. (obsolete) Sorrowfully; grievously.

Forms of dearnly

comparativemore dearnly
superlativemost dearnly

Questions about dearnly

What is dearnly the alternative form of?
Dearnly is the alternative form of dernly.

Words near dearnly in the dictionary

  1. dearnesses
  2. dearnful
  3. dearning
  4. Dearnley
  5. Dearnleys
  6. dearnly
  7. dearns
  8. dearomatisation
  9. dearomatisations
  10. dearomatise
  11. dearomatised

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dearnly (page history and authors); dernly (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “dearnly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dearnly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.