flexibly

adverbB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #15,039 of 15,258Too rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

Flexibly means in a way that bends easily to what is needed. Work flexibly.

It is the word every employer uses and few define, which is where the arguments start. To work flexibly should mean choosing hours rather than being available at all of them.

Definitions of flexibly

1adverbflexiblyIn a way that bends easily to what is needed.B2+
“The team worked flexibly and nobody could say what that meant.”

flexibly is a manner.

Where it comes from

Latin
flexibilis
Middle French
flexible
English
flexible
English, today
flexibly

Built from

flectō · Latin — to bend, curve

From flexible + -ly. flexible comes from Middle French flexible, from Latin flexibilis, from flectō (“to bend, curve”). Morphologically flex + ible.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

flexibly in the wild

A general-purpose machine gun (GPMG) is an air-cooled, usually belt-fed machine gun that can be adapted flexibly to various tactical roles.
General-purpose machine gun
In order to achieve these goals, our technical systems will have to act more independently, flexibly, and autonomously, i.e. they will have to exhibit lifelike properties.
Organic computing
The Business edition of this program contained information about 7 million businesses in the United States, just like Yellow Pages, but could quickly and flexibly be searched.
Lotus Marketplace
The aircraft was almost entirely made of metal and armed with three 7.7 mm machine guns, one of which was rear-facing and flexibly-mounted.
Aichi E16A Zuiun
The refueling / charging infrastructure should be sufficiently developed so that one can use its vehicle flexibly without worry about finding a filling station.
Motor fuel

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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.

Related words

the flectō family

reflect flexible

flexibly — used about once every 159,543 pages · #15,039 · point at the bar for the others

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