plausibly

adverbC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — plausible sits at #6,640leans written

Plausibly means in a way that sounds believable. Argue plausibly.

Sounding right and being right are different things, which is the whole warning in the word. Something stated plausibly gets past people who would question the same claim stated badly.

Definitions of plausibly

1adverbplausiblyIn a way that sounds believable.C1
“He explained it plausibly and every word was invented.”

plausibly is a manner.

Where it comes from

Latin
plausibilis — deserving applause, praiseworthy, acceptable, pleasing
English
plausible
English, today
plausibly

Built from

plaudere · Latin — to applaud

From plausible + -ly. plausible comes from Latin plausibilis (“deserving applause, praiseworthy, acceptable, pleasing”), from the participle stem of plaudere (“to applaud”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

plausibly in the wild

Verona Rupes is the tallest known cliff on Miranda, a moon of Uranus, and plausibly holds the record for the highest cliff in the Solar System.
Verona Rupes
The sole entry requirement for the club is that one must have a physical resemblance to plausibly look like a son of Marvin.
The Sons of Lee Marvin
Several explanations have been proposed: a lower limit to the pliable asthenosphere, a phase transition, and most plausibly, depth variation in the shear wave anisotropy.
Lehmann discontinuity
Of these, only the Middle Miocene "Colius" palustris might plausibly belong there, but it is more often separated in Necrornis.
Colius
In this book, she examines how and when politicians play the race card and then manage to plausibly deny doing so.
The Race Card (book)

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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 plaudere family

explode applaud

plausibly — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

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