How to Use adverb in a Sentence

adverb

noun
  • In “arrived early,” “runs slowly,” “stayed home,” and “works hard” the words “early,” “slowly,” “home,” and “hard” are adverbs.
  • Laughter is a noun with many possible adverbs.
    — Big Think, 5 Nov. 2025
  • Adjectives and adverbs were as precious to her as cashmere and silk.
    — The Economist, 6 July 2019
  • With all those adverbs, expressing the mess can also be a mouthful.
    — Christian Lorentzen, New Republic, 9 Feb. 2018
  • Real people don’t think of things in quite so many adverbs, or adjectives.
    — Joe Fassler, The Atlantic, 22 Dec. 2014
  • One piece of advice commonly given to writers is to avoid adverbs.
    — Nitsuh Abebe, New York Times, 4 Apr. 2017
  • Maybe overwrought prose or sentences loaded with adverbs will one day draw a little less derision.
    — Michael Waters, The Atlantic, 21 May 2026
  • The city of big apples, hand-​tossed pizzas and the colloquial adverb deadass.
    — Lizz Schumer, PEOPLE, 27 Jan. 2026
  • The next morning, Archie makes quick work of moving hay bales shirtlessly (Is that an adverb?
    — Jessica MacLeish, Teen Vogue, 6 Dec. 2018
  • That may bring a halt to the Boston Girl’s letter-writing campaign against the almighty adverb.
    — John Nogowski, Hartford Courant, 17 Jan. 2025
  • There are no pauses, few adverbs, and, most notably, few interjections by Faye.
    — Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 15 June 2018
  • Skilled writers use action beats to break up dialogue and convey emotion, rather than relying on adverbs.
    — Jd Barker, Rolling Stone, 10 Oct. 2024
  • As the cognitive scientist Tomer Ullman has pointed out, a couple of misleading adverbs are enough to trip it up.
    — Paul Bloom, The New Yorker, 29 Nov. 2023
  • Insecurity, lack of experience, and more can spark a need to embellish the facts and cause candidates to qualify their words with adverbs to 'amp' things up.
    — Mark Murphy, Forbes, 19 Feb. 2023
  • The bound words were nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that always existed with markers indicating a relation to other objects, events or states.
    — Anvita Abbi, Scientific American, 16 May 2023
  • Anonymous interviews were quoted on the record without attribution but using just the adverbs, which strongly implied that the chairman’s ex-wife is drinking again.
    — Bruce Headlam, The New Yorker, 9 Sep. 2024
  • Also inseparable from their prefixes, which endowed them with meaning, were adjectives and adverbs.
    — Anvita Abbi, Scientific American, 16 May 2023
  • That tension between adverb and adjective conveys a subtlety and disquiet reflected in the images.
    — Mark Feeney, BostonGlobe.com, 9 Aug. 2023
  • The vocabulary included only names of colors and actions, so no modifiers, adjectives, or adverbs.
    — Ars Technica, 1 Feb. 2025
  • Leonard’s ear for dialogue and laconic style, along with a droll sense of humor and just enough field research, combined to make his crime novels endlessly entertaining (apologies for the adverb).
    — Erik Spanberg, The Christian Science Monitor, 5 June 2018
  • But Turtle Bay still offers Midtown convenience at a relatively affordable price (heavy stress on the adverb).
    — Julie Lasky, New York Times, 10 Jan. 2018
  • These diagrams break sentences down into noun phrases and verb phrases and then further subdivide them into nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and so forth.
    — Steve Nadis, Quanta Magazine, 31 Oct. 2025
  • Fraudulent stories tend to differ in subtle ways, including their heavy use of adverbs and adjectives as well as slang, simple sentence structures, and relatively few commas and quotations.
    — David Cox /, NBC News, 15 Feb. 2018
  • Other aspects of grammar could have emerged in a similarly natural way; facial expressions, for example, are natural adverbs, modifying the actions that are signed.
    — Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine, 11 Nov. 2019
  • What if every college football school trademarked an appropriate conjunction, preposition, adverb, pronoun or interjection of three letters or shorter?
    — Mike Finger, ExpressNews.com, 15 Aug. 2019
  • His critics fear that the style, improvised and inflammatory, might create substantive havoc, particularly in the realm of foreign policy, where the smallest gradations of adjective or adverb can affect real lives.
    — Richard Fausset, New York Times, 25 Jan. 2017
  • Articles and prepositions indicate analytical thinking and predict higher grades; pronouns and adverbs indicate narrative thinking and predict lower grades.
    — Science News Staff, Science | AAAS, 5 July 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'adverb.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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