Word.ws English Dictionary

hesitantly

hesitantly adverb: with hesitation.

Adverb

hesitantly (comparative more hesitantly, superlative most hesitantly)

  1. With hesitation.
    • The sounds from Barb's clarinet began to take the shape of a melody, played quietly at first, hesitantly, with a misblown note here and there.2013, Michael Craft, Boy Toy, →ISBN
    • It approaches irrefusably, hesitantly, terrible as fate, the great task and question: how shall the earth as a whole be managed? (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1885)2006 December, Michael Lang, “Globalization and Its History”, in The Journal of Modern History, vol. 78, no. 4, page 924
  2. With reluctance.
    Synonyms:
    reluctantly

Synonyms of hesitantly

Forms of hesitantly

comparativemore hesitantly
superlativemost hesitantly

Origin of hesitantly

From hesitant + -ly.

Questions about hesitantly

What does hesitantly mean?
Hesitantly means with hesitation.
What part of speech is hesitantly?
Hesitantly is an adverb.

Words near hesitantly in the dictionary

  1. hesitance
  2. hesitances
  3. hesitancies
  4. hesitancy
  5. hesitant
  6. hesitantly
  7. hesitate
  8. hesitated
  9. hesitater
  10. hesitaters
  11. hesitates

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hesitantly (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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