Word.ws English Dictionary

nervously

nervously adverb: in a nervous manner; feeling or displaying nervousness.

Adverb

nervously (comparative more nervously, superlative most nervously)

  1. In a nervous manner; feeling or displaying nervousness.
    • He paced nervously as he waited for the important phone call.
    • Then he could see the modest bookseller, somewhat clammy in his extremities and lost within his academic robe and hood, nervously fidgeting his mortar-board, haled forward by ushers, and tottering rubescent before the chancellor, provost, president (or whoever it might be) who hands out the diploma.1919, Christopher Morley, “Again the Narrative is Retarded”, in The Haunted Bookshop, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, →OCLC, page 171

Examples of nervously in a sentence

  • She clutched her purse tightly and walked nervously into the building.
  • She dialed nervously, praying that Grandma would pick up the phone and everything would turn out OK.
  • She sat and nervously twiddled her hair while she waited.

All 40 example sentences with nervously

Forms of nervously

comparativemore nervously
superlativemost nervously

Origin of nervously

From nervous + -ly.

Questions about nervously

What does nervously mean?
Nervously means in a nervous manner; feeling or displaying nervousness.
What part of speech is nervously?
Nervously is an adverb.

Words near nervously in the dictionary

  1. nervous wrecks
  2. nervous-nellie
  3. nervous-nelly
  4. nervouser
  5. nervousest
  6. nervously
  7. nervousness
  8. nervousnesses
  9. nervular
  10. nervule
  11. nervules

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nervously (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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