adequately

adverbB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,369 of 15,258leans written

Adequately means well enough for the purpose. Adequately funded, adequately explained, not adequately protected.

It is faint praise and often a criticism in disguise, since saying something was done adequately says it was not done well. In reports and inspections it is the word that sets a floor rather than a standard.

Definitions of adequately

1adverbadequatelyWell enough for the purpose.B2+
“Make sure you are adequately dressed for the cold before you go out.”

adequately is a degree.

Where it comes from

From adequate + -ly.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

adequately in the wild

Strict conditionals are the result of Clarence Irving Lewis's attempt to find a conditional for logic that can adequately express indicative conditionals in natural language.
Strict conditional
Carbon dioxide is produced continuously as the body's cells respire, and this CO2 will accumulate rapidly if the lungs do not adequately expel it through alveolar ventilation.
Respiratory acidosis
None have been adequately tested to determine whether they are safe and effective for this purpose.
Leaky gut syndrome
The officer must ensure that "the laws of the state are uniformly and adequately enforced".
California Attorney General
Because no single translation adequately conveys the layered sense of the word, the French term is usually used in English writing.
Arrondissements of Haiti

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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