Word.ws English Dictionary

dernly

dernly adverb: secretly.

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 dernly

comparativemore dernly
superlativemost dernly

Origin of dernly

From dern + -ly.

Questions about dernly

What does dernly mean?
Dernly means secretly.
What part of speech is dernly?
Dernly is an adverb.

Words near dernly in the dictionary

  1. dernier
  2. dernier cri
  3. derniers cris
  4. dernies
  5. derning
  6. dernly
  7. derns
  8. derny
  9. dernys
  10. dero
  11. deroach

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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: “dernly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dernly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.