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

increasingly

adverbB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,310 of 15,258leans written

Increasingly means more and more as time goes on. Not a lot yet, but the direction is clear.

It is one of the workhorses of journalism and academic writing, and it usually sits before an adjective, giving increasingly difficult, increasingly rare, increasingly common. Its usefulness is that it describes a trend without needing a figure, which is also why careful readers treat it with suspicion. It can begin a sentence, as in increasingly, people are working from home. The verb is increase and the opposite trend word is decreasingly, which is rarely used.

Definitions of increasingly

  1. 1adverbincreasinglyMore and more over time.B2

    “It is becoming increasingly difficult to find parts.”

Where it comes from

  1. Middle English

    encreessingli

  2. English, today

    increasingly

From Middle English encreessingli, equivalent to increasing + -ly.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 10 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

increasingly in the wild

  • The Discovery Channel has been available to Danish viewers since 1989, but started becoming increasingly localised during the 2000s.

    Discovery Channel (Denmark)

  • Vulnerable habitat or species are monitored and can become increasingly threatened.

    Vulnerable species

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.