legitimately
/lədʒˈɪtəmətli/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.36 in modern English
18
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
5
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
adv
In a legitimate manner, properly, fair and square.
Example Sentences
- "Later, when we played King's Quest 2, I remember being legitimately terrified while inside Dracula's castle. Like, I had nightmares in 16 color EGA."
- "I bought the magazines, ran home after work, filmed myself flipping through the pages—half legitimately fangirling over the boys, half making fun of people like myself who fangirl over the boys."
- "The patient, in saying 'that's the strange thing' is making explicit the fact that, in selecting the possibility of disturbed sleeping habits as a manifestation of anxiety, the counsellor has correctly or legitimately used the documentary method."
- "During his hourlong tire fire of an interview . . . the sheer volume of breathtaking lies flippantly uttered by President Trump made it legitimately difficult to decide which one of them posed the most direct threat to American democracy."
- "But, unlike those weapons, which could sustain high speeds in the 40s of knots in short bursts, the Type 93, whilst still being somewhat faster than them, could keep on trucking right out to 22,000 yards. At a more mundane 36 knots, it would run twice as far with its near-eleven-hundred-pound warhead. For the first time in the dreadnought era, a nation had a torpedo that could legitimately be fired, not only beyond the practical range of enemy guns, but also beyond the absolute range limits of practically any battleship gun then in service, at least in the slower speed setting, whilst also being near-invisible, due to the almost complete absence of exhaust gasses."
Etymology
Etymology tree English legitimate Proto-Indo-European *leyg-der. Proto-Germanic *līkąder. Proto-Germanic *-līkaz Proto-Germanic *-ê Proto-Germanic *-līkê Proto-West Germanic *-līkē Old English -līċe Middle English -ly English -ly English legitimately From legitimate + -ly.
Inflected Forms
more legitimately (comparative)
most legitimately (superlative)