What is an adverb?

An adverb can describe or qualify three other parts of speech:

  1. a verb: e.g. — The Greeks fought bravely, but the Trojans drove them relentlessly back to the ships.

  2. an adjective: e.g. — The Greeks were extremely brave.

  3. an adverb: e.g. — The Greeks fought extremely bravely.

Many adverbs are derived from nouns by adding the suffix -ly as you can see in the table below:

adjective
adverb
          quiet          quietly
         bright          brightly
         unfortunate          unfortunately
         hopeless          hopelessly

N.B.  You cannot make adverbs from adjectives like 'friendly' or 'ghastly' because they already end in '-ly'.

Many adverbs are not derived from nouns. The table below will show you some of them.

too
very
enough
yesterday
today
tomorrow
soon
often
sometimes
quite
rather
already
otherwise
upwards
ever

Read the following paragraph and find all the adverbs:

Arachne had often created beautifully woven tapestries which she proudly displayed to her admirers, but she was arrogant enough to challenge the goddess Athene herself and she very foolishly insisted on having a competition. Naturally, Athene won but she furiously tore Arachne's lovely work to pieces but since Arachne had loved weaving so much, Athene turned the girl's hanging body into a spider and thus her skill was never forgotten.

Check your answers here

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