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

manfully

adverbC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,777 of 15,258neutral

Manfully means with determined courage. Struggle manfully, manfully resisted, carry on manfully.

It is dated and often faintly comic now — manfully usually describes somebody making a brave show of a losing effort. The assumption buried in it, that courage is male, is why writers reach for gamely or bravely instead.

Definitions of manfully

  1. 1adverbmanfullyWith determined courage.C1

    “Though his team was losing badly, the goalkeeper struggled on manfully until the final whistle.”

manfully is a manner.

Where it comes from

Manful plus -ly, from man plus -ful. The word assumes courage as a male quality, which is why it has dated.

  1. Middle English

    manfully

  2. English, today

    manfully

From Middle English manfully; equivalent to manful + ly.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

manfully in the wild

  • The college motto is "Exspecta Dominum Viriliter Age", meaning "Expect the Lord and act manfully" in Latin.

    St. Sebastian's College, Moratuwa

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.