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fluently

adverbB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,158 of 15,258leans written

Fluently means speaking a language smoothly, without struggling for words. Speak French fluently, read fluently, fluently bilingual.

Fluency is about flow rather than correctness — somebody can speak fluently and make mistakes, and somebody accurate can be painfully slow. Claiming to speak a language fluently is a strong claim and is made far too readily on job applications. Note fluent, from the Latin for flowing.

Definitions of fluently

  1. 1adverbfluentlySpeaking a language smoothly, without struggling for words.B1+

    “After two years in Madrid, she spoke Spanish fluently.”

fluently is a manner of speaking.

Where it comes from

  1. Latin

    fluens — flowing

  2. English

    fluent

  3. English, today

    fluently

Built from

  • fluō · Latin — to flow

From fluent + -ly. fluent comes from Latin fluens (“flowing”), present active participle of fluō (“to flow”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Everyday Adjectives

Practise this word

fluently in the wild

  • Hirsch, referring to the ability to understand and participate fluently in a given culture.

    Cultural literacy

  • Former Nightwish singer Anette Olzon performed the song at Stockholms Kulturfestival with the backing of an orchestra, and without the band, despite not speaking Finnish fluently.

    Kuolema tekee taiteilijan

  • An accomplished linguist, in addition to his native Italian, Lawrence could read and speak Latin, Hebrew, Greek, German, Czech, Spanish, and French fluently.

    Lawrence of Brindisi

  • Prior to working for CNN, she was a correspondent for The Washington Post and The New Zealand Herald in Indonesia as she speaks both English and Indonesian fluently.

    Atika Shubert

  • Younger individuals tend to speak Portuguese more frequently and fluently than their elders, but older individuals generally struggle with Portuguese and use it only with non-indigenous Brazilians.

    Rikbaktsa language

1 / 2

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.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

the fluō family

fluentsuperfluousfluentlyaffluent

fluently — used about once every 8,182 pages · #11,158 · point at the bar for the others

  • fluency