Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

gladly

UK/ˈɡlædli/US/ˈɡlædli/
adverbB1Common in everyday speech and writing · #3,681 of 15,258leans spoken

Gladly means willingly and with pleasure. I would gladly help, gladly accepted, gladly given.

It answers a request rather than describing a mood — saying you would gladly do something is an offer. It is slightly formal and warm. Note that not gladly suffer fools comes from a biblical phrase and means having no patience with them.

Definitions of gladly

  1. 1adverbgladlyWillingly and with pleasure.B1

    “I'll gladly help you move house this weekend.”

gladly is a manner.

Where it comes from

Old English gladlice is glad plus the -lice ending that makes adverbs. Glad first meant bright or shining.

  1. Old English

    glædlīċe — gladly

  2. Middle English

    gladly

  3. English, today

    gladly

From Middle English gladly, gladliche, from Old English glædlīċe (“gladly”); equivalent to glad + -ly. Compare Danish glædelig (“joyful”), Icelandic gleðilegur (“delightful”). More at glad, -ly.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

gladly in the wild

  • Suffer fools gladly is a phrase in contemporary use, coined by Saint Paul in his second letter to the Church at Corinth.

    Suffer fools gladly

  • Virgin insisted it be included in this set, otherwise I'd gladly erase it from our history.

    Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me)

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.