969: Hard and Hardly Aug 4, 2017

Much of the time, the only thing necessary to make an adjective into an adverb is to add the suffix '-ly', but as the phrase "working hard or hardly working?" illustrates, 'hardly' does not retain the meaning of 'hard' when it becomes an adverb at all. The word 'hardly' used to only mean 'with force' or 'with effort' but that changed in the 16th century when the word gained the senses of 'barely', 'not at all', and as a way to soften a negative, such as "I can't hardly tell what this word means". Now, it would be incredibly rare and possibly confusing to hear 'hardly' mean what it had originally. To communicate that sense that the adverb used to have, the word 'hard' functions as an adjective, as in "the way he slammed the door was hard", but can also be used as an adverb such as "he slammed the door hard".