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What is "painfully"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
painfully
adverb
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
painfully obvious (=very obvious, and embarrassing or upsetting)
▪ It became painfully obvious that she and Edward had nothing in common.
painfully shy (=extremely shy)
▪ As a teenager, I was painfully shy.
painfully slow (=much too slow)
▪ The legal system can be painfully slow.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
apparent
▪ At Pontypool, the collision between a precise, scientific industry and a diffuse, unscientific local suspicion is painfully apparent.
▪ But the limits of his approach to the job have become painfully apparent.
aware
▪ I have quoted the passage from which the phrase comes, showing how Wells was painfully aware of our duality.
▪ I am painfully aware of this fact.
▪ Chapman was painfully aware that he had underestimated the task at Walsall.
▪ I am painfully aware of how we get caught up in our times and become contaminated by our own hypocrisy.
▪ He answered the door himself, and she was painfully aware that once again his eyes seemed to study every part of her.
▪ As you are painfully aware, when it comes to being handy, I can barely work a shower curtain.
▪ And as he drew nearer, Cornelius became painfully aware of a curious buzzing sound in his ears.
▪ Folly was painfully aware that she was acting completely unreasonably.
clear
▪ It is becoming painfully clear, however, that students at Stirling University can no longer afford to take their Association for granted.
▪ This process makes the long-term costs of decisions painfully clear to the press and the public.
▪ Sometimes the pitfalls in not looking at it from all these angles become painfully clear.
▪ During that long hospital stay, it became painfully clear that I had two choices.
▪ The risk of denying all of these at once had been painfully clear in 833.
evident
▪ It was soon painfully evident that the fears of the University Council regarding a minority plot to unseat them were justified.
hard
▪ Granted, inflation is painfully hard to cure once it has taken off.
▪ It was still painfully hard for many of the students to sustain a conversation.
▪ For Louis the Pious's following, the choice was painfully hard.
obvious
▪ She had resented Eline from the first moment and made her hate of Joe Harries painfully obvious.
▪ Should the government reduce the actual frequency of tragedies, or should it simply make them less painfully obvious?
▪ Statistics aren't necessary to document what is painfully obvious.
▪ It was soon painfully obvious who the winner was in this contest.
▪ It was becoming painfully obvious that apart from a brief, overpowering lust there was no reciprocation of her fragile feelings.
▪ Perhaps the most important of those things seems painfully obvious, at least to wine country insiders.
▪ It has become even more painfully obvious now.
▪ For all her cheerfulness it was painfully obvious that she was feeling awful.
shy
▪ I retreated into my shell, being painfully shy in the first place.
▪ Riddlesberger is particularly engaging as a painfully shy techno-nerd.
▪ The result was that I was painfully shy.
▪ I am considered to be fairly outgoing but as a teenager I was painfully shy.
▪ From being a painfully shy, diffident recluse, he suddenly metamorphosed into a garrulous and sometimes painfully overbearing extrovert.
slow
▪ Although painfully slow, it meant he could construct small sentences.
▪ But the council got off to a painfully slow start.
▪ Still, too many of them, like too many people throughout the division, remained painfully slow in taking action.
▪ In spite of this painfully slow start, today he is a millionaire.
▪ Piecemeal Development Attempting to build a school-to-work system company by company and school by school is painfully slow.
▪ There is every indication that youth apprenticeships will continue to grow in the United States, but at a painfully slow rate.
▪ The painfully slow elevators, whose speed can be measured in millimeters per hour.
▪ The school building program -.. is creeping along at a painfully slow clip.
thin
▪ Anorexics have a false idea of their own appearance, seeing themselves as fat even when they have become painfully thin.
▪ She was painfully thin and there was an insubstantiality about her.
▪ In spite of this, she became painfully thin.
▪ In shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, he looked almost painfully thin.
▪ She was beautiful - painfully thin, but beautiful, even with the ravages of drug abuse drawing her face.
▪ Like her brother she was painfully thin, but otherwise they seemed utterly unlike, despite being twins.
▪ She wasn't just slim, she was painfully thin.
■ VERB
become
▪ It is becoming painfully clear, however, that students at Stirling University can no longer afford to take their Association for granted.
▪ During that long hospital stay, it became painfully clear that I had two choices.
▪ Anorexics have a false idea of their own appearance, seeing themselves as fat even when they have become painfully thin.
▪ Sometimes the pitfalls in not looking at it from all these angles become painfully clear.
▪ In spite of this, she became painfully thin.
▪ And as he drew nearer, Cornelius became painfully aware of a curious buzzing sound in his ears.
▪ But the limits of his approach to the job have become painfully apparent.
▪ It was becoming painfully obvious that apart from a brief, overpowering lust there was no reciprocation of her fragile feelings.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a painfully learned lesson
▪ At first, Andrews had found it painfully uncomfortable to play in public.
▪ Her rings dug painfully into my fingers.
▪ Muriel watched her father die painfully of cancer.
▪ Rebuilding the damaged bridge will be painfully slow.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Anorexics have a false idea of their own appearance, seeing themselves as fat even when they have become painfully thin.
▪ Blacks, however, remain painfully aggrieved.
▪ Finally he found his way painfully back to the house, and closed the door.
▪ In spite of this painfully slow start, today he is a millionaire.
▪ It was soon painfully obvious who the winner was in this contest.
▪ She had resented Eline from the first moment and made her hate of Joe Harries painfully obvious.
▪ She was making deep eye contact with me and a couple of her rings were digging into my fingers rather painfully.
▪ The smaller Chelonian whirled about and kicked him painfully in the ribs.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Painfully

Painful \Pain"ful\, a.

  1. Full of pain; causing uneasiness or distress, either physical or mental; afflictive; disquieting; distressing.
    --Addison.

  2. Requiring labor or toil; difficult; executed with laborious effort; as a painful service; a painful march.

  3. Painstaking; careful; industrious. [Obs.]
    --Fuller.

    A very painful person, and a great clerk.
    --Jer. Taylor.

    Nor must the painful husbandman be tired.
    --Dryden.

    Syn: Disquieting; troublesome; afflictive; distressing; grievous; laborious; toilsome; difficult; arduous. [1913 Webster] -- Pain"ful*ly, adv. -- Pain"ful*ness, n.

Wiktionary
painfully

adv. In a painful manner; as if in pain.

WordNet
painfully

  1. adv. unpleasantly; "his ignorance was painfully obvious" [syn: distressingly]

  2. in or as if in pain; "she moved painfully forward"; "sorely wounded" [syn: sorely] [ant: painlessly]

Usage examples of "painfully".

The musty auditorium was a dimly lit torture chamber, filled with the droning dull voice punctuated by the sharp screams of the electrified, the sea of nodding heads abob here and there with painfully leaping figures.

Painfully tentative tugs at its contractile strands brought the dense, dark axial bar safely down into the pit.

There was a heavy clang, a thundering crash, the ship trembled, tilted, heeled, and slowly, painfully, settled back upright as Bade hung onto the desk and Runckel dove for cover.

Kirk could do about it, except Ally no-and that could undo an the courtesy they had so painfully extended to bn Bem thus far.

He was roused, painfully, by Brockle Buhn, who seemed to have adopted him.

Afterward, I conducted an autopsy at the naval hospital at Agana, which confirmed that Bunkie would indeed have died painfully if I had not intervened.

His groin tightened painfully at the thought, and he angrily tempered the burgeoning lust.

Father Cesare sat his hefty body upon his chair once more, his eyes wincing in pain as the bones wracked painfully together.

I felt myself vibrating painfully to the rhythmical sound of the cicalas which filled the atmosphere.

Neutrally Buoyant First Order Ubiquitous Climax Clade Gas-Giant Dwellers, to grant them a still more painfully precise specification - were large creatures of immense age who lived within the deliriously complex and topologically vast civilisation of great antiquity which was distributed throughout the cloud layers wrapping the enormous gas-giant planet, a habitat that was as stupendous in scale as it was changeable in aerography.

She felt herself that it might be so, and I could see how painfully anxious she was.

I was thus painfully situated when I thought I could see a light through the crevices of a small house.

After lengthy weighing of the pros and cons, during which he became painfully aware that his seat of jurisdiction had been badly bruised beneath that confounded bell-pull, the jury at last managed to agree upon one point, that the corpse in question was the remains of one Gabriel Creach which everyone had known in the beginning.

To begin, Leo, with his golden curls turned a snowy white, his clothes nearly rent from his body, his worn face and his hands a mass of bruises, cuts, and blood-encrusted filth, was a sufficiently alarming spectacle, as he painfully dragged himself along the ground, and I have no doubt that I was little better to look on.

The dauphin and dauphiness were deeply shocked by a disaster so painfully at variance with their own happiness, which, in one sense, had caused it.