Arithmetically
adv ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 In a way characterized by addition (of increments) rather than multiplication (by factors) or exponentiation (by exponents): by an arithmetic progression.
"Over the past decade the business has grown arithmetically, which shows that it is serving a demand successfully; but because it has not grown exponentially, its growth is viewed by some investors as "not good enough.""
- 2 In terms of arithmetic.
"The two terms are arithmetically equivalent, but they are not equally intuitive regarding what phenomenon they represent in the real world."
- 1 with respect to arithmetic wordnet
Example
More examples"You say that you're afraid of being disliked by other people, but you have some people that you dislike yourself, don't you? Arithmetically speaking, there are an equal number of people who you don't like that don't like you back. I'm not saying that if you end your dislike of someone, someone else will stop disliking you as well; it's just that you can't change the fact that if you dislike someone, then someone else dislikes you as well. Your life will go much smoother if you just give up and accept that truth."
Etymology
From arithmetical + -ly.
More for "arithmetically"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.