‘Adverbing’ merrily

Exploring words that modify adjectives, verbs, other adverbs, and even sentences.

In traditional grammar, there are eight parts of speech (or word classes), one of which is adverb. What is an adverb? The word is derived from Latin ad “to” + verbum “a word” – but the components give no clue as to the meaning of the word, and my use of the word as a verb (which does not exist) does not help matters.