Word.ws English Dictionary

shrewdly

/ˈʃɹuːdliː/

shrewdly adverb: in a shrewd manner.

Adverb

shrewdly (comparative more shrewdly, superlative most shrewdly)

  1. In a shrewd manner.
    • Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly [on a newspaper] he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn...1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, →OCLC; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans...

Forms of shrewdly

comparativemore shrewdly
superlativemost shrewdly

Origin of shrewdly

Inherited from Middle English schrewedly (“wickedly, harshly”). By surface analysis, shrewd + -ly.

Questions about shrewdly

What does shrewdly mean?
Shrewdly means in a shrewd manner.
What part of speech is shrewdly?
Shrewdly is an adverb.
How do you pronounce shrewdly?
Shrewdly is pronounced /ˈʃɹuːdliː/.

Words near shrewdly in the dictionary

  1. shrewdie
  2. shrewdies
  3. shrewdish
  4. shrewdities
  5. shrewdity
  6. shrewdly
  7. shrewdness
  8. shrewdnesses
  9. shrewdom
  10. shrewdy
  11. shrewed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shrewdly (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.

Last updated:

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