in earnest

1. 1.

   in a serious manner

   “talking earnestly with his son”

   “she started studying snakes in earnest”

   “a play dealing seriously with the question of divorce”

   Synonymsseriouslyearnestly

Questions about in earnest

What does in earnest mean?

in earnest means "in a serious manner".

What is another word for in earnest?

Close synonyms include seriously, earnestly. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is in earnest a common word?

in earnest is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.