DESPERATELY

Pronunciation (US): (GB):

I. (adverb)

Sense 1

Meaning:

With great urgency

Example:

the soil desperately needed potash

Synonyms:

desperately; urgently

Classified under:

Adverbs

Pertainym:

desperate (showing extreme urgency or intensity especially because of great need or desire)

Sense 2

Meaning:

In intense despair

Example:

the child clung desperately to her mother

Classified under:

Adverbs

Pertainym:

desperate (arising from or marked by despair or loss of hope)

Credits

Context examples:

Both looked quite 'calm and firm', and both felt desperately uncomfortable.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

Again the inoffensive one plunging desperately, was elevated high into the air.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He is desperately in love and means to marry her.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

If it were not such a very wild night, he said, I would send Hannah down to keep you company: you look too desperately miserable to be left alone.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

"Won't some of you help?" Scott cried desperately at the crowd.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

If the part is trifling she will have more credit in making something of it; and if she is so desperately bent against everything humorous, let her take Cottager's speeches instead of Cottager's wife's, and so change the parts all through; he is solemn and pathetic enough, I am sure.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

Of Elinor's distress, she was too busily employed in measuring lengths of worsted for her rug, to see any thing at all; and calmly continuing her talk, as soon as Marianne disappeared, she said, Upon my word, I never saw a young woman so desperately in love in my life!

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed the current of my ideas.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

"But you do not know how many," she objected desperately.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

In half-an-hour I sighted the second one, swamped and bottom up, to which were desperately clinging Jock Horner, fat Louis, and Johnson.