Hopefully

What’s the Trouble with 'Hopefully'?

For centuries, the word “hopefully” meant “in a hopeful manner.” For example, the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in his essay “El Dorado,” “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,” meaning that enjoying the journey, traveling with a hopeful disposition, is better than getting to your destination.

“Hopefully” plays the role of an adverb in that sentence. It’s modifying the verb “travel” the same way adverbs like “quickly” or “frugally” would. You could travel quickly, travel frugally, or travel hopefully. Traveling hopefully sounds like more fun.

But words can take on new uses over time, and in the 1960s, people started using “hopefully” to mean “I hope” or “we hope,” as in “Hopefully, we’ll get to go on vacation this year.” It became trendy.

Sentence Adverbs

In that sentence, “hopefully” is playing the role of sentence adverb. “Hopefully” means “I am hopeful that we’ll get to go on vacation this year.” In that kind of sentence, “hopefully’ is just like the sentence adverbs  “thankfully,” “mercifully,” and “fortunately.” You see, adverbs modify verbs, but they can also modify other adverbs or, as they do in this case, whole sentences. “Hopefully, we’ll get to go on a vacation this year,” is just like “Thankfully, we’ll get to go on a vacation this year,” and “Fortunately, we’ll get to go on a vacation this year.”

The weight of opinion accepts the modified definition of 'hopefully.'

The American Heritage Dictionary has useful entries called “usage notes” that tell you when a word is controversial, and they note that people are illogical in their objection to “hopefully” being used as a sentence adverb. They do usage surveys, and they find that people aren’t bothered by sentence adverbs in general—very few people object to “mercifully” being used as a sentence adverb, for example—people object only to “hopefully” being a sentence adverb. It seems to be special, in a bad way, and the only explanation American Heritage can muster is that people didn’t like “hopefully” at first because it was trendy, and then even after the trendiness wore off and “hopefully” became ubiquitous in...

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