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Adverb Checker

Paste your writing and see every adverb — with the ones sitting on dialogue tags called out separately, because that is the only place the famous advice actually holds up.

173 / 10,000 characters

What we found

He walked to the door and knocked .

"You are late," she said .

The reply was friendly enough, but he was tired of explaining himself.

3 adverbs, 1 on a dialogue tag, 3 intensifiers in 3 sentences. Adverbs are a normal part of English. Here is where they are, so you can decide which ones are carrying their weight.

30 words3 sentences10 words per sentenceFlesch Reading Ease 81.1Grade 4.4

What to look for

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LegendAa AdverbAa Adverb on a dialogue tagAa IntensifierAa Stock phraseAa Passive, actor namedAa Passive, no actor namedAa Borderline — probably an adjectiveAa Get-passive (informal)

Every finding, in order

One card per finding, with what it is and why it is here. Nothing on this page is marked as an error, because none of it is one.

  1. He walked quickly to the door and knocked very loudly.

    quickly is an adverb ending in -ly. Noted

    "quickly" is an -ly adverb. That is not a fault. The useful test is whether it repeats what the verb already carries ("shouted loudly") or does work the verb cannot do ("walked deliberately"). If a stronger verb would say it better, use the stronger verb.

    No rewrite offered: deleting a word is not a rewrite.

  2. He walked quickly to the door and knocked very loudly.

    very is an intensifier or hedge. Noted

    "very" is an intensifier or a hedge. This is a style observation, not a rule. The one signal worth acting on: a hedge stacked on an intensifier ("really very tired") almost always means the right word has not been found yet.

    No rewrite offered: this is an observation, not a defect.

  3. He walked quickly to the door and knocked very loudly.

    loudly is an adverb ending in -ly. Noted

    "loudly" is an -ly adverb. That is not a fault. The useful test is whether it repeats what the verb already carries ("shouted loudly") or does work the verb cannot do ("walked deliberately"). If a stronger verb would say it better, use the stronger verb.

    No rewrite offered: deleting a word is not a rewrite.

  4. "You are late," she said sharply.

    sharply is an adverb sitting on a dialogue tag. Worth a look

    "sharply" is propping up "said". This is the one case where the famous advice holds up: if the line itself does not already carry the tone, an adverb bolted to the attribution rarely rescues it. "Said" plus a line that earns the tone almost always reads better.

    No rewrite offered: choosing a stronger line is not something a rule set can do.

  5. The reply was friendly enough, but he was really just tired of explaining himself.

    really is an intensifier or hedge. Noted

    "really" is an intensifier or a hedge. This is a style observation, not a rule. The one signal worth acting on: a hedge stacked on an intensifier ("really very tired") almost always means the right word has not been found yet.

    No rewrite offered: this is an observation, not a defect.

  6. The reply was friendly enough, but he was really just tired of explaining himself.

    just is an intensifier or hedge. Noted

    "just" is an intensifier or a hedge. This is a style observation, not a rule. The one signal worth acting on: a hedge stacked on an intensifier ("really very tired") almost always means the right word has not been found yet.

    No rewrite offered: this is an observation, not a defect.

What this cannot do. It cannot resolve genuinely ambiguous adjectival passives — neither can a human without context. It works on English only. It will occasionally miss a passive with an unusual intervening phrase, and will occasionally flag a stative that reads as active. It is a rule set, not a parser: a full parse would be more accurate and would cost several hundred kilobytes of JavaScript, which would slow the page down for a gain most users would never notice.

This is a free adverb checker that runs entirely in your browser. No signup, no account, no paid tier above it, and nothing you paste is uploaded, because there is no server to upload it to. It finds every -ly adverb in your text, minus the several hundred words that merely end in -ly, and it separates out two classes that are worth looking at differently: adverbs attached to dialogue tags, and intensifiers.

It also does not tell you to delete them. Adverbs are a normal word class and English needs them. What a checker can honestly do is show you where they are, so you can ask the only question that matters — does this one do work the verb cannot do?

What is an adverb?

An adverb modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, or a whole clause. All four turn up constantly:

What this tool finds, precisely, so nothing surprises you.It matches words ending in -ly, subtracts two hand-written exception lists, and adds a short closed list of common non--ly intensifiers (very, quite, just, really, actually, and their relatives). That is deliberate coverage rather than complete coverage: adverbs like soon, here, often, well, seldom and everywhere are real adverbs and this tool does not flag them, because nobody arrives at an adverb checker worried about "soon". If you want every adverb in the linguistic sense, you want a parser, not this page.

Are adverbs bad?

The line everyone quotes is real, and it is from a real book:

"I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops."Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000)

It gets repeated as a blanket prohibition on a word class, which is not what the surrounding chapter argues. King's complaint is aimed most specifically at adverbs in dialogue attribution, and in the same chapter he says outright that the best form of dialogue attribution is "said". The argument is about a writer propping up dialogue that should carry its own weight — not about the existence of the word "slowly".

So here is the craft test, which is more useful than the slogan and is something you can actually apply to a finding:

That is a judgement a person makes about one sentence. "Delete every -ly word" is not advice, it is a find-and-replace, and it is why this tool never offers to do it for you.

Adverbs in dialogue tags

This is the one case where the folklore holds up, and it is why the tool gives it its own colour instead of lumping it in with every other -ly word. Compare:

"Put it down," he said menacingly.
"Put it down. I will not ask again," he said.

The second is more menacing, and it is more menacing because the line does the work rather than the tag announcing it. An adverb on an attribution is nearly always a note to the reader that the dialogue did not land — and the reader can feel the note being passed.

This tool flags an -ly adverb as a dialogue-tag adverb when it sits within two words of an attribution verb in a sentence that also contains a quotation mark. The attribution verbs it knows are the ordinary set: said, say, asked, replied, answered, shouted, whispered, muttered, murmured, exclaimed, added, continued, cried, and their inflections. Everything else stays in the plain adverb class, because "he walked slowly" and "he said menacingly" are genuinely different findings and showing them in the same colour would be lying about that.

-ly words that are not adverbs

Flagging these is the single most common bug in -ly checkers, and it is the reason a naive regex is worse than useless: a tool that tells a novelist "friendly" is an adverb has told them the tool cannot be trusted. Here are the lists this checker holds, and never flags.

Nouns and verbs that end in -ly

Adjectives that end in -ly

These describe nouns, not verbs. There is no verb "to be friendly at" something in the way there is a verb to modify with "quickly".

Both adjective and adverb, and not worth your attention

These are genuinely adverbs some of the time. Nobody arriving at this page is worried about "daily", so they are never flagged.

Very, really, just, actually: intensifiers and hedges

A separate, lighter class, and explicitly a style observation rather than a rule. The words:

Most of these are fine most of the time, and a draft with "just" in it is not a draft with a problem. There is exactly one signal here worth acting on, and it is a good one: a hedge stacked on an intensifier — "really very tired", "quite absolutely certain", "just simply better" — almost always means the writer has not yet found the right word and is adding volume instead. When you see two of these in a row, the sentence is telling you something.

Cliches and stock phrases

The third lens, off by default, is a hand-written list of 233 stock phrases — "at the end of the day", "low hanging fruit", "the tip of the iceberg". It was compiled by hand rather than generated, which is why it is a few hundred entries rather than a few thousand: every one of them is on there because somebody decided it had stopped producing an image.

A cliche is not an error either. Idiom is how a language carries meaning cheaply, and a sentence that should not draw attention to itself is often better off with a phrase the reader can skim. The findings are worth looking at because a stock phrase is frequently sitting exactly where you had something more specific to say and reached for the ready-made version instead.

How this checker finds adverbs, and what it can get wrong

It tokenizes your text with character offsets, splits it into sentences using an abbreviation stop list so "Dr. Smith" does not become two sentences, and then matches words ending in -ly against the three exception lists above. Anything left is an adverb. If it is within two words of an attribution verb in a quoted sentence, it becomes a dialogue-tag adverb instead. The intensifier list is a straight closed-set match, with one guard: "pretty" is only counted when something follows it to intensify.

What it gets wrong, plainly:

Checking passive voice as well

The same engine has a second lens for syntax rather than word choice. If you want to see every "be" plus past participle in your draft, with the genuinely ambiguous ones separated out instead of being called errors, the passive voice checker is the same tool with that lens on by default. You can also flip the Passive voice chip above without leaving this page.

Frequently asked questions

What is an adverb?

An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, or a whole clause. "She walked slowly" modifies a verb; "surprisingly good" modifies an adjective; "very quickly" modifies another adverb; "Frankly, it did not work" modifies the clause. Many adverbs end in -ly, but plenty do not — soon, here, often, well, very, quite.

Are adverbs bad?

No. Adverbs are an ordinary word class and English needs them. The advice people are remembering is narrower than the slogan it turned into: an adverb that repeats what the verb already carries ("shouted loudly") is dead weight, and an adverb bolted onto a dialogue tag is usually propping up a line that should carry its own tone. An adverb doing work the verb cannot do — "walked deliberately" — is not a fault, and deleting it makes the sentence worse.

Did Stephen King say never use adverbs?

Not quite. In On Writing (2000) he wrote "I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops," which is the line everyone quotes. The surrounding chapter is narrower: his complaint is aimed most specifically at adverbs in dialogue attribution, and he says outright that the best form of dialogue attribution is "said." Read as a rule about attribution it is good craft advice. Read as a ban on a word class it is not what he argued.

How many adverbs is too many?

There is no number, and anybody quoting one is quoting a preference. Adverb density varies hugely by genre and by register — dialogue-heavy commercial fiction sits in a different place from a technical manual. The useful question is never "how many" but "which ones": go finding by finding and ask whether the verb already said it.

What are -ly words?

Shorthand for the large group of English adverbs formed by adding -ly to an adjective: quick becomes quickly, careful becomes carefully. The shorthand is imprecise in both directions. Plenty of adverbs have no -ly (soon, well, here, very), and plenty of -ly words are not adverbs at all — friendly and lovely are adjectives, supply and reply are verbs, family and butterfly are nouns.

Is "friendly" an adverb?

No. "Friendly" is an adjective — it describes a noun, as in "a friendly dog", and there is no verb it can attach to. It is the single most common false positive in -ly checkers, along with lovely, likely, costly, deadly, timely and elderly. This tool holds a list of them and never flags any of them.

What should I use instead of an adverb?

Usually a stronger verb, occasionally nothing at all. "Walked quickly" wants to be "hurried" or "strode"; "said loudly" wants to be "shouted" — or, more often, wants the line of dialogue itself to be loud enough that no tag is needed. But this is a craft judgement, not a substitution table, which is why this tool never offers you a replacement word. It shows you where the adverbs are; the choice is yours.

Does this send my text anywhere?

No. The analysis runs entirely in your browser using word lists already in the page. There is no server to send your text to, so there is no analysis request to see in your browser Network tab. The only requests this page makes are the site analytics that run on every page, and they carry counts — how many findings, roughly how long your text was — never a word of what you wrote. Your text is excluded from session recording, never stored, and never put in the URL.

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