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The sentence

The beautifully highlighted word caught her eye.

works well. Now I want to say the same thing but instead of expressing that the highlighting was beautiful, I want to point out that it was red. However, to my (non-native) English mind, both "redly" and

The red highlighted word caught her eye.

just sound wrong.

Is there a word I can place in this sentence to say that the highlighting is red?

(I know that I could resort to completely different constructions like "The word highlighted in red" but that's not what this question is about.)

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    'Redly'. M-W; Collins; Wiktionary .... It's probably a rare example; adding -ly to colour adjectives isn't very productive. *Pucely. *Purplely. *Vermilionly.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Oct 19 at 18:01
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    @EdwinAshworth I'm afraid this is a very wrongly-barked-up tree.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Oct 19 at 18:44
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    @EdwinAshworth Because I don't believe that mud-splattered trousers have been splattered "mudly", only muddily, just like star-lit scenes haven't been lit "starly", only starrily. You can't form manner-adverbs out of nouns simply by adding -ly since that would produce only an adjective, like man > manly does. But colors may be some sort of niche word-class of their own, depending on your model.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Oct 19 at 20:19
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    See, for example, bluely (adv.) and redly (adv.) in the OED with their citations and the examples in Google Books. You might quarrel with the uses, but you won't be shadow boxing. Examples date far back and continue. I especially like "The barefooted, bluely attired Lovegrove" from 2007.
    – DjinTonic
    Commented Oct 20 at 0:39
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    I would be happy with using "the red highlighted text" to mean "the text highlighted in red". While technically it might mean that the text is red and highlighted in some other colour, I would not normally understand it that way unless a comma was added after "red".
    – Peter
    Commented Oct 20 at 7:51

5 Answers 5

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You don't want an "adverb". That's not how these work. You need a noun, which is what you already have.

Compound adjectives whose second element is in the form of verb inflected into its past participle (or look that way, as in mustachioed) can take a noun as their first element:

  • evening-lighted scene
  • pock-marked visage
  • flea-bitten mutt
  • bacon-fed children
  • awe-stricken spectators
  • air-popped popcorn
  • star-lit sky
  • foot-worn paths
  • bottle-fed kittens
  • water-marked stationery
  • sky-colored blossoms

It is the same with colors:

  • silver-tongued rascal
  • red-lined errors
  • grey-haired head
  • gold-tipped feathers
  • violet-colored gorget
  • yellow-bellied sapsucker
  • red-taped packages
  • green-eyed monster
  • red-backed salamander
  • red-billed hornbill
  • black-capped chickadee

So what you have is already what you need there. Those do not need to become manner adverbs, which would not make any sense.

Think of it is as two-word phrase acting as a modifier. The interior grammar of that phrase does not need to somehow contain the types of words you can use only as a modifier itself.

That's not to say that adverbs are impossible here. Consider seldom-seen phenomena or highly regarded leaders.

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    I'm not sure your examples match mine. After all, green-eyed monster does not mean that the monster has been eyed in green; it means that the monster has green eyes. The word after the color is not derived from a verb but from a noun. (I do realize that highlight is also a noun, but this is only coincidental. Replace it by drawn, if you like.)
    – schtandard
    Commented Oct 19 at 21:29
  • Now, some examples in your first list do match mine more closely (though not precisely), but are you really saying that the red-marked visage is the way to go? It sounds to me that it should mean marked by red rather than marked in red.
    – schtandard
    Commented Oct 19 at 21:29
  • @schtandard Are the marks red or the visage itself? You cannot have a ❌ pockly marked face instead of a pock-marked face, that's for sure. And yes, it's a red-striped flag or a white-striped flag or a red-and-white striped flag, never a ❌ redly and whitely striped flag, just as it must be blue-lined paper never ❌ bluely lined paper. That just isn't how these all work. That you're reaching for paraphrasals using these colors as objects of prepositions shows they're nouns here—which is why you cannot mannerly adverb them: there are no manners of color.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Oct 19 at 22:48
  • But these are again example of the second type, no? striped is derived from a noun, not a verb. Would you say that the red-drawn symbol is the correct way of saying that the symbol was drawn in red?
    – schtandard
    Commented Oct 20 at 13:43
  • red-lined errors is legalese...and means a word is struck through with a red line.
    – Lambie
    Commented Oct 21 at 15:55
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No, there is no such adverb

Adverbs can have lots of different meanings depending on what they’re derived from, what constructions they’re used in, and many other factors.

The names of colours do not readily lend themselves to adverbs in English at all. Words like redly and bluely are attested, but they’re vanishingly rare.

There are quite a few verbs that allow their instrumental objects to form the first part of hyphenated compounds like the ones listed in tchrist’s answer; highlight is one of them. You could (in theory, at least) describe something as being asterisk-highlighted (i.e., highlighted through the use of asterisks). You might even get away with red-highlighted, but it doesn’t sound quite right – the colour doesn’t ‘feel’ instrumental enough to allow it. (Talking about someone’s blue-painted face would be fairly normal, though, and it’s perfectly common to speak of a red-stained sky – in those cases, the colour is more strongly instrumental.)

What you definitely could not get away with would be to create an adverb from the instrumental and use that to modify the verb, because that adverb would end up being an adverb of manner (as adverbs in -ly mostly are), describing in what way the verb was carried out – which is fundamentally different from an instrumental or a resulting colour:

  • an *asteriskly highlighted word is a word highlighted in an asterisk manner
  • a *bluely painted face is a face painted in a blue manner
  • a *redly stained sky is a sky stained in a red manner

None of these make any sense, of course, because actions cannot be carried out in an [instrument/colour] manner – that’s just not semantically possible in English.

Conversely, a beautifully highlighted word is perfectly possible and logical, since you can do things in an [adjective of estimation] way in English. But beautiful(ly) then describes the manner of highlighting, not an instrumental or similar, so you couldn’t switch it around and create a compound from it without changing the meaning fundamentally: a ?beauty-highlighted word would be a word that had been highlighted using beauty as an instrument (which is at least borderline meaningless), not one highlighted in a beautiful way.

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  • +1 A bit overdue, though ;-)
    – Araucaria - Him
    Commented Oct 21 at 18:07
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    @Araucaria-Him A most welcome one, even if most English speakers are unaware of instrumental case in other languages. The baffling incidence of bogoforms like oncely,twicely,seldomly,oftly,oftenly,abroadly —not to mention thusly —over the past 50 years appears to support a puzzling notion that people think they must somehow “forcibly and mannerly convert” perfectly fine adverbs that were not to the manner born.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Oct 21 at 20:12
  • Do you think "The red highlighted word caught her eye." doesn't work?
    – listeneva
    Commented Oct 22 at 2:39
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    @listeneva Personally, I don’t think it works, no, especially without the hyphen (unless you mean ‘the red word which was highlighted’). I wouldn’t consider it ungrammatical, but it is awkward.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Oct 22 at 3:19
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(1) *The word highlighted redly caught her eye.
(2) The word highlighted in red caught her eye.
(3) The word highlighted red caught her eye.

(1) is ungrammatical, (2) is grammatical and idiomatic, and (3) is grammatical albeit less idiomatic than (2). Now, redly is unequivocally an adverb and (2)'s red is a noun. But I'd say (3)'s red is more like an adjective describing the color attribute of word than an adverb describing the manner in which it is highlighted.

Here's an attested example of (3):

As part of the new technique, the reader's eye is drawn to the 'optimal recognition point' in the word, which is highlighted red.

<2018 The Telegraph>

Based on this observation, we can say (4) doesn't work but (5) does:

(4) *The redly highlighted word caught her eye.
(5) The red highlighted word caught her eye.

Here are attested examples (Boldface mine):

She looked up at the red highlighted letters hanging over the entrance: Wild Clover Seed Message.

<Marriage in the Red>

Vineet typed in something in the FIND command function window and the text scrolled to a yellow highlighted word. The word was "nuke."

<Ballistic>

When you are done sharing your screen, return to the Zoom app and tap the red Stop Share button, or tap on the upper-left corner of your screen on the red-highlighted clock feature from anywhere else you may be browsing or sharing on your phone. In other words, you do not have to actively click back to the app to stop sharing your screen if you do not wish to. NOTE: "Red-highlighted clock" refers to the typical clock telling you the time, seen on the upper left of your phone (unless otherwise set up to appear elsewhere). When the clock is highlighted in red, it means your screen is being recorded and, in the case of Zoom, shared. This is the same red highlight that would appear over your clock if you were to use the Record Screen function outside of Zoom.

<Introduction to Teaching with Zoom>

Even in jeans and a simple top, Noriko exuded femininity with her careful makeup and red-highlighted hair that fell in soft layers around her face.

<2002 The New York Times>

“Don’t be afraid to fight,” shouted the director, Alex Dmitriev, on the third go around of a scene between the young characters Catherine and Rodolpho. “This is a lover’s quarrel.” Scripts with yellow highlighted lines were strewn about. Props wouldn’t be brought in until tech week around May 23, so actors were improvising with preschool furniture and toys.

<2018 The New York Times>

And in all these red is an adjective.

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    Note that in the Marriage in the Red quote, the most likely reading is that the text itself is red, not that the highlighting is red; and in the NYT example, the hair has not been highlighted in red, but features red highlights (i.e., highlighted is derived from the noun highlight(s) and the construction is parallel to blue-eyed). So neither of these is a true example of the inverted form of highlighted red.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Oct 21 at 10:33
  • @JanusBahsJacquet I think you're right about the Marriage in the Red quote. I will edit it out later. And I largely agree with your analysis of the NYT example. But even if it's not "a true example of the inverted form of highlighted red", I think it can still be a example showing a construction similar to OP's.
    – JK2
    Commented Oct 22 at 0:50
  • @JanusBahsJacquet I've added another book example from Ballistic just below the Marriage in the Red quote.
    – JK2
    Commented Oct 22 at 3:01
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    That context makes it clear that it must be the highlighting that’s yellow (since a yellow box behind the text is precisely what happens when you search for a word in various applications). But even with this level of disambiguation, my brain still wants to read it as yellow text that’s highlighted.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Oct 22 at 3:23
  • @JanusBahsJacquet I've started my answer with the highlighted red construction not to argue that OP's example is its inverted form, but to argue that adjective red, not adverb red, is being used predicatively in red highlighted word just as in word highlighted red.
    – JK2
    Commented Oct 22 at 3:33
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*The redly highlighted word caught her eye.

The problem you have is that the action of highlighting was not done "redly" and an adverb referring to a colour is not appropriate. Next, redly does not mean "in red."

"His face coloured redly" is not the same as "His face coloured in red."

"The redly highlighted word caught her eye." is not the same as "The word highlighted in red caught her eye."

You wish to describe the state of the highlighting as "red". States are described by adjectives.

You need to look at the differences between adjuncts and adverbs and adjectives.

Redly, bluely, blackly, etc. all exist but are required to be used in the correct context.

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  • I can't quite follow. 1. an adverb is not appropriate Why not? Is beautifully not an adverb? 2. redly does not mean "in red." What does it mean then? M-W defines it as in a red manner, with red color. 3. Relatedly: "The redly highlighted word caught her eye." is not the same as "The word highlighted in red caught her eye." What does the first one mean, then?
    – schtandard
    Commented Oct 19 at 21:34
  • @schtandard I can't quite follow. 1. an adverb is not appropriate Why not? Is beautifully not an adverb? As the question is about adverbs of colour, I thought it would be reasonably obvious that "colour adverb" was implied... Obviously, I was wrong. I will add to my answer for your benefit.
    – Greybeard
    Commented Oct 20 at 9:55
  • Why not just "the word in red"?
    – Lambie
    Commented Oct 21 at 15:57
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Beautiful is an adjective. Just because beautifully it has an LY on the end doesn't make it an adverb. The sense of it is 'in a beautiful way' There is no verby bit.

He spoke loudly is a proper use because there's action going on to which the adverb can be applied. She danced beautifully for the same reason.

If you want to say something is red then say it! To say The sun set redly is not normal language. Your options are *The red sun set" which is boring and doesn't really take the reader very far, or something like The sun set in a blaze of crimson... (Adverbs are cheap shortcuts which skip over the details. If you're worried about cliches or want to spend a moment describing something then take each one you see in a draft and wonder if you can't use a couple more words to do better.)

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