Dictionary

flabbergastingly en · ADV

Etymology

From flabbergasting + -ly.

Meanings

1. Surprisingly, astonishingly or amazingly
   • 1922, George Jean Nathan, Henry Louis Mencken. The smart set: a magazine of cleverness, Volume 69. Ess Ess Pub. Co. page 49. (There) must be sympathy in the back parlor if it is to get its message across, and that this flabbergastingly important message... is as follows:...
   • The critical wonderment over the at times curious unevenness of Monckton Hoffe's dramatic writing, over the startlingly good suddenly crossed with the flabbergastingly bad, and vice versa... 1971, George Jean Nathan, Materia critica, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, page 115:
   • He had said he would clean his room a thousand times before, but this time he actually did it, and flabbergastingly well too.
   • It was a good date but the food at the restaurant was so flabbergastingly excellent I could barely think of anything else to talk about.
   • As I write, the flabbergastingly fecund David Crystal has just published another book in the tradition, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left. 2009, Jason McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, Penguin:

Forms