Vocabulary
Barely
English and Urdu gloss, synonyms and antonyms, and example usage from our editorial sentence cache where available.
English meaning
only just; almost not.
Urdu meaning
دلیری ذہنی خلفشار
Example sentences (from Dawn)
Sentences are selected from stored editorial text where your search word appears. If none appear yet, run the admin sentence generator for fuller coverage.
- That is barely a third of the target.
- Their deaths received barely a few sentences in the press.
- On Friday, the government raised the cost to $7.7bn a staggering 79pc increase over an initial estimate of $4.3bn made barely two and a half years ago.
- One can only hope that Lula`s model of a broad, barely ideological democracy, however flawed, will again trump the potentially rabid far-right alternative.
- In more recent times, many have openly confronted the establishment`s political engineering and economic empire, the barely disguised interventions of imperialist forces, and the brutalisation of the peripheries.
Synonyms
hardly, scarcely, just, only just, narrowly, by the skin of one’s teeth, by a hair’s breadth
Curator example
“she nodded, barely able to speak”
More vocabulary to explore
About this vocabulary section.
These entries support close reading of Dawn editorials and opinion pieces: short definitions,
Urdu equivalents where we have them, word relations, and—when generated—real lines from the editorial archive
so you can see tone and usage.
Common questions
- Do I need to sign up to use this vocabulary page?
- No. Word pages are open to everyone. You can read meanings in English and Urdu, synonyms and antonyms, and example sentences without creating an account.
- Where do the example sentences come from?
- When available, example sentences are drawn from cached matches in our Dawn editorial corpus so you can see how a word is used in real newsroom-style prose.
- How is this different from a dictionary?
- This section is curated for students preparing for competitive exams and editorial reading. Entries are compact, often include Urdu glosses, and are paired with in-context lines from editorials when we have them.
