Human-verified examples from authoritative sources
Exact Expressions
60 human-written examples
The West Side Story soundtrack was a festival of overdubs, with the marquee stars doing scarcely any of the singing.
There has scarcely been a better German goalkeeper since than Trautmann, who has died aged 89.
In a nation held to ransom by well-armed thugs, and lacking almost all infrastructure, these remarkable people – often motivated as much by a desire to keep their country alive as to make money – supply tiny desert settlements all over the nation with scarcely any losses.
The Movement for Change appears to have been treated as if it was an embarrassment: it was scarcely mentioned during the Labour campaign.
It was decades before the outside world learned anything of what went on in the warren of dilapidated huts surrounding the ugly Edwardian mansion in Buckinghamshire, but the bright young women recruited from secretarial colleges, the armed forces, or straight from school, scarcely knew any more.
The return of the man who was signed to take over from Cristiano Ronaldo has unsettled Nani, leading to a marked deterioration in form, but it has scarcely mattered such is the way Valencia has slipped back into the side so seamlessly.
The navy fired the odd Tomahawk cruise missile from its submarines at the north African state and seized a rare opportunity to fire the guns of its destroyers, but the army scarcely got a look in.
It's scarcely believable the humble Highlanders could actually still finish on top.
This is a gloomy enough out-look but the long-term forecast is scarcely any better according to Tony Travers, director of LSE London, a research centre at the London School of Economics.
In 1934, Simon Kuznets, a Harvard professor and the Nobel-winning brain behind the idea of how to construct a measure of GDP, wrote the following in a report on national income to the US senate: "the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income".
I had scarcely met Stephen, and then one Saturday I met some old friends for coffee and they were saying, 'Gosh it's terrible about Stephen, isn't it?' They told me that he had been in St Bartholomew's hospital in London having horrible tests and then had been diagnosed with an atypical form of a rare disease – motor neurone disease.
How to use
Learn how to use "scarcely" with practical examples and tips.
How to useThe adverb "scarcely" functions as a qualifier, indicating a minimal degree or frequency of an action or state. As shown in Ludwig examples, it modifies verbs, expressing that something almost didn't happen or exists to a minimal extent. Ludwig AI confirms its proper usage.
Expression frequency: Very common
