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say it: BER-lee
barely is an adverb meaning "only a very short time before". It carries 3 recorded senses.
almost not
“he hardly ever goes fishing”
“he was scarce sixteen years old”
“they scarcely ever used the emergency generator”
“I can hardly hear what she is saying”
“she barely seemed to notice him”
“we were so far back in the theater, we could barely read the subtitles”
by a little
“I only just caught the bus”
“he finished the marathon in just under 3 hours”
“it was barely 5 a.m.”
“the network has barely 5 percent of viewers”
“the batter just missed being hit”
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for barely come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.