Paste your writing to instantly highlight every -ly adverb, while a built-in exception list skips words like family, only and early that just happen to end in -ly.
Overusing -ly adverbs is one of the most common notes editors give new writers — it's often a sign that a stronger verb is hiding underneath.
Spotting every "quickly ran" or "quietly whispered" makes it easy to swap in a punchier single verb.
A built-in exception list keeps words like family, only and holy from cluttering your results.
Per-word counts reveal which adverbs you lean on most across an entire draft.
The classic writing advice to "avoid adverbs" is really shorthand for avoiding lazy ones — a manner adverb bolted onto a weak verb, like "walked slowly" instead of "trudged" or "said loudly" instead of "shouted". This tool scans for any word ending in -ly using a simple pattern match, which catches the vast majority of English manner and degree adverbs such as quickly, honestly, frankly and accidentally. The tricky part is that plenty of everyday words end in -ly without being adverbs at all: family and supply are nouns, only and early are usually adjectives or intensifiers, friendly, lovely, silly and holy are adjectives, and place names like Italy trip up naive checks constantly. This tool ships with a built-in exception list covering those common cases, so your results stay focused on real adverbs instead of getting buried in noise. It's a pattern-matching aid, not a full part-of-speech parser, so it can't understand context the way a human editor can — a handful of genuine edge cases may slip through either direction. Treat the highlights as a fast first pass that flags where to look closely, then use your own judgment on which adverbs are actually weakening a sentence and which are doing real work.
Looks for any word ending in -ly across your pasted text.
Common non-adverb -ly words are filtered out automatically.
Use it to spot candidates, then apply your own editorial judgment.
It scans your text for words ending in "ly" and highlights them, while skipping a built-in exception list of common words like family, only, early and likely that end in "ly" but are not adverbs.
It's a fast pattern-based check, not a full grammar parser, so it may occasionally miss an unusual case; it's meant to speed up self-editing, not replace careful proofreading.
Those words end in "ly" but function as nouns or adjectives, not adverbs, so they're included in the built-in exception list and skipped automatically.
Yes. Below the highlighted text you'll see a list of every distinct adverb found along with how many times it was used.
No. Everything runs locally in your browser with plain JavaScript, and your text is never sent to a server or stored.
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