literally

• lit. (abbreviation)
• litterally (obsolete)

From Middle English litteraly. See literal and letter. By surface analysis, literal +‎ -ly.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈlɪtəɹəli/, /ˈlɪtɹəli/

• Audio (UK):

  (file)

• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈlɪtəɹəli/, /ˈlɪtɹəli/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

literally (comparative more literally, superlative most literally)

2. Word for word, exactly as stated.
   1. Without overstatement or understatement, or false or misleading words.

      He's prone to exaggeration, so don't take what he says literally.

      There are literally millions of individual pieces of space debris orbiting Earth.

   2. With phrasings that might normally be used or understood as figurative: truly; not figuratively; not as an idiom or metaphor.

      Synonyms: actually, really, unfiguratively, unmetaphorically; see also Thesaurus:actually

      Antonyms: figuratively, idiomatically, metaphorically, virtually

      Hyponym: overliterally

      Coordinate term: etymonically

      When I saw on the news that there would be no school tomorrow because of the snowstorm, I literally jumped for joy, and hit my head on the ceiling fan.

      I didn't have time to repair the wall, so I literally just papered over the cracks.

      • 1969, Allen V. Ross, Vice in Bombay, London: Tallis Press, page 142:

        Lights were going out. A raid! A raid! It was a panic, literally, in a whorehouse!

      • 1991, Douglas Coupland, “Dead at 30 Buried at 70”, in Generation X, New York: St. Martin's Press, →OCLC, page 31:

        All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.

      • 2012 May 24, Nathan Rabin, “Film: Reviews: Men In Black 3”, in The Onion AV Club‎^[1]:

        […] Men In Black 3 finagles its way out of this predicament by literally resetting the clock with a time-travel premise that makes Will Smith both a contemporary intergalactic cop in the late 1960s and a stranger to Josh Brolin, who plays the younger version of Smith’s stone-faced future partner, Tommy Lee Jones.

      • 2021 January 7, Luke Broadwater, Emily Cochrane, “Inside the Capitol, the Sound of the Mob Came First”, in The New York Times‎^[2], →ISSN:

        As lawmakers and staff rushed out, aides snatched the boxes containing the Electoral College certificates, making sure that the vandals could not literally steal the results of the election.

   3. Draws attention to a pun or other wordplay involving an idiom.

      My daughter's pet rabbit had babies, and now we've literally got rabbits coming out of our ears.

      • 2013 March 27, Melanie Kloetzel, Carolyn Pavlik, editor, Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces‎^[3], University Press of Florida, →ISBN, page 341:

        What literally broke the ice that first night was when a 98-year-old retired professor spoke up. “Well, I have a choice of what to think about when I have insomnia at night. Being a lover of mathematics, last night when I couldn't sleep, I decided to calculate the tonnage of ice I delivered as a boy.”

      • 2023 November 29, Frederick Douglass, The Complete Works: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, The Heroic Slave...‎^[4], Good Press, page 1306:

        Outside of all the learned institutions of his country, and while employed with his chisel and hammer, as a stone mason, this man literally killed two birds with one stone; for he earned his daily bread and at the same time made himself an eminent geologist, and gave to the world books which are found in all public libraries and which are full of inspiration to the truth seeker.

      • 2025 July 1, Filippo Menga, Thirst: The Global Quest to Solve the Water Crisis‎^[5], Verso Books, →ISBN, page 91:

        Profit and corporate giving are, quite literally, two sides of the same coin.

4. As an intensifier.
   1. (colloquial) Used as a general intensifier or dramatiser, sometimes tending towards a meaningless filler.

      I had no idea, so I was literally guessing.

      I was literally having breakfast when she arrived.

      She was literally like, "What?", and I was literally like, "Yeah".

      Literally who is this?

      • 2015, “On the Run”, in Steven Universe:

        Pearl: Steven, we are not like the No Home Boys. We are literally standing in your home right now.

   2. (sometimes proscribed) Used as an intensifier with statements or terms that are in fact meant figuratively and not word for word as stated: virtually, so to speak.

      He was so surprised, he literally jumped twenty feet in the air.

      On 9/11 people were literally glued to their TV sets.

      People can't even express their opinions freely in this country any more. Literally 1984!

      • 1827, Sir Walter Scott, “Appendix to Introduction”, in Chronicles of the Canongate‎^[6], archived from the original on 15 June 2021:

        The house was literally electrified; and it was only from witnessing the effects of her genius that he could guess to what a pitch theatrical excellence could be carried.

      • 1993, Wayne W. Dyer, Real Magic, page 193:

        You literally become the ball in a tennis match, you become the report that you are working on […]

      • 2017 April 22, New Straits Times, Malaysia, page 20:

        [O]ne can assume that the millions or billions of ringgit spent on the war against drugs have gone down the drain, literally.

5. (colloquial) Used as a generic downtoner: just, merely.

   Synonyms: merely; see also Thesaurus:merely

   It's not even hard⁠ to make—you literally just put it in the microwave for five minutes and it's done.

   It won't take me long to get back, cause the store's literally two blocks away.

• Many speakers and writers object to the use of literally as an intensifier (sense 2), wanting the word to be reserved to its strict sense (sense 1), whereas many other speakers and writers do not abide by this prescription. In fact, the use of literally as an intensifier in both spoken and formal written English predates the complaints around its use in that way by several centuries. Nevertheless, it is worth knowing that if one's own speech or writing is intended to persuade or impress (for example, in formal contexts), using this word loosely tends to be counterproductive to those goals.