What does "hierarchically" mean?

Of, relating to, or arranged in a hierarchy.

What is a synonym for "hierarchically"?

Common synonyms include: in order, in succession, in turn, step by step.

Pronounced //ˈhaɪə(ɹ)ˌɑː(ɹ)k.ɪk.æli//.

//ˈhaɪə(ɹ)ˌɑː(ɹ)k.ɪk.æli// adv

adv ·Rare ·Advanced level

Adverb

1
Of, relating to, or arranged in a hierarchy.
"Unlike, say, botany or zoology, or even in a thesaural structure of a knowledge database, where the syntactical and semantic relationships between concepts is often highly ordered (e.g. hierarchically, cohyponymically), the central concepts and meanings in the field of management are more consensually negotiated."
2
Pertaining to a transitive relation between objects by which they may be ordered into a hierarchy.

Adverb

"My father was the ultimate authority of that family in which power was hierarchically passed down to the eldest brothers."

From hierarchical + -ly.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.