wholly

Valid in Scrabble

Scrabble points
15
Words With Friends
15
Letters
6
Pronunciation
/ˈhəʊ.li/
See all 8 pronunciations
/ˈhəʊ.li/ · [ˈhəʊ.lɪ] · /ˈhəʊl.li/ · [ˈhɒʊɫ.lɪ] · /ˈhoʊ.li/ (US) · [ˈhoʊ.li] (US) · /ˈhoʊl.li/ (US) · [ˈhoʊɫ.li] (US)

Definition of wholly

3 senses · 1 part of speech · etymology included

adv

  1. (not-comparable)Completely and entirely; to the fullest extent.
    “wholly wrong”
    “And Moses sware on that day, saying, Surely the land whereon thy feet haue troden, shall be thine inheritance, and thy childrens for euer, because thou hast wholly followed the Lord my God.”
    “Carried somehow, somewhither, for some reason, on these surging floods, were these travelers, of errand not wholly obvious to their fellows, yet of such sort as to call into query alike the nature of their errand and their own relations.”
    “The explosion rocked the Riteng Computer Accessory Co., a wholly owned subsidiary of Pegatron, in Shanghai’s Songjiang district.”
See all 3 definitions

adv

  1. (not-comparable)Completely and entirely; to the fullest extent.
    “wholly wrong”
    “And Moses sware on that day, saying, Surely the land whereon thy feet haue troden, shall be thine inheritance, and thy childrens for euer, because thou hast wholly followed the Lord my God.”
    “Carried somehow, somewhither, for some reason, on these surging floods, were these travelers, of errand not wholly obvious to their fellows, yet of such sort as to call into query alike the nature of their errand and their own relations.”
    “The explosion rocked the Riteng Computer Accessory Co., a wholly owned subsidiary of Pegatron, in Shanghai’s Songjiang district.”
  2. (dialectal, excessive, informal, not-comparable)Completely and entirely; to the fullest extent.
    “‘You ain't very strong, are you?’ said a neighbour with sympathetic intent, and ‘You don't have very good health, I expect?’ asked another. Mr Colville said, ‘He do look wholly pale, that's a fact.’ The word ‘wholly’ thus used puzzled me for some time. In Suffolk it is used for ‘very’ or ‘really’, and crops up in almost every sentence. But at first I thought Mr Colville was ascribing to me an air of sanctity.”
  3. (not-comparable)Exclusively and solely.
    “A creature wholly given to brawls and wine.”

Definitions from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA.

Etymology

From Middle English holly, holeliche, holliche (also as halely, hallich, etc.). Doublet of earlier holy. By surface analysis, whol(e) + -ly.

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