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say it: HAHRD-lee
hardly 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”
slowly and with difficulty
“prejudices die hard”
“he was so dizzy he could hardly stand up straight”
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for hardly 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.