Adverbs by Letter: A to Z

What is on this list?

This is the index for the site's full adverb list: twenty-six pages, one per letter, covering every single-word adverb in the data set from A through Z. Each letter page shows its adverbs as a grid of cards, and every card pairs the word with a short definition, which is the piece most “words starting with” lists skip in favour of a bare column of words. The same approach already exists here for adjectives, nouns, verbs, animals and foods, so this hub extends the pattern to the fourth of the four major word classes.

In total there are 1,322 adverbs across the letters, drawn from Princeton WordNet and filtered down from a much larger starting set, described in the next section. From here you can jump straight to any letter; once you are on a letter page you get a count, a search box that filters by word or definition, and a row of links back to the other twenty-five letters, so you never have to return to this hub just to move from one letter to the next.

How this list was built

1. Sourced from Princeton WordNet 3.1. Every adverb across all 26 letters starts life as one of the 3,736 single-word adverb entries in Princeton WordNet, a lexical database built by linguists at Princeton University. Multi-word adverbs were set aside before anything was split by letter.
2. Filtered by WordNet's own observed-frequency signal. WordNet's semantic concordance is a body of text hand-tagged by lexicographers, and each entry records how many of its senses were actually found there. Keeping only adverbs with at least one observed sense cuts the set from 3,736 to 1,285, which is what the 26 letter pages are built from.
3. Defined with WordNet's glosses. Each card's definition is WordNet's own gloss for that sense, trimmed to the definition itself with usage examples removed, so the wording across all 26 pages matches the source database rather than a paraphrase.

What is missing, and why

Adverbs are the smallest and loosest of the four major word classes this site covers: WordNet lists about 3,700 single-word adverbs against more than 56,000 nouns, so the full set spread across 26 letters is short by nature rather than because of anything cut after the fact. It is also dominated by -ly forms — three quarters of the set ends that way — since adding -ly to an adjective is how English builds most of its adverbs. The non-ly entries are the smaller but usually more interesting half of the list.

Multi-word adverbs such as “of course”, “at last” and “for good” are excluded throughout, because they are not single words even though they function as adverbs. The frequency filter is corpus-based rather than web-based, built from text tagged decades ago, so a few current adverbs are missing and a few dated ones remain, and WordNet's American English means some British spellings are absent from the letter you would expect. Four letters needed help to avoid being nearly or completely empty: J, K and Y have almost nothing above the frequency filter and Z has nothing at all, so those pages are topped up from below the threshold with every added entry marked. X could not be topped up at all — WordNet contains no adverb beginning with X at any frequency — so that page explains the absence instead of listing words.

Why is it free?

Every page in this set, including this hub, is static: generated once from WordNet and served without calling a model, storing anything, or touching a server per visit, so there is no cost that scales with traffic. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account to create, no watermark on anything you copy, and no paywall anywhere in the 26 letters.