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wildly

UK/ˈwaɪldli/US/ˈwaɪldli/
adverbB1+Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,112 of 15,258neutral

Wildly means in an uncontrolled way, or to an extreme degree. Gesture wildly, wildly inaccurate, wildly popular.

The second sense has almost taken over: wildly is now mostly an intensifier, and it attaches to both praise and criticism — wildly successful and wildly wrong are equally common. The literal sense survives in describing movement.

Definitions of wildly

  1. 1adverbwildlyIn an uncontrolled way, or to an extreme degree.B1+

    “The crowd cheered wildly as the winning goal went in.”

wildly is a degree.

Where it comes from

Wild plus -ly, from Old English wilde, untamed.

  1. Middle English

    wildely

  2. English, today

    wildly

From Middle English wildely, wijldeli, wildeliche, equivalent to wild + -ly.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

wildly in the wild

  • The estimated number of speakers varies wildly from about 1000 to half a million.

    Yemsa language

  • With his new slogan, Eastman and the Eastman Kodak Company became wildly successful and helped make photography popular.

    You Press the Button, We Do the Rest

  • The former amount wildly changes depending on the region, with Navarre accounting for the largest share of publicly owned forest and Galicia the smallest.

    Forestry in Spain

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

  • wild