obscurely

[ uhb-skyoor-lee ]

adverb

1. in a way that is not expressed clearly or plainly; ambiguously or vaguely:

   This question, although obscurely phrased, is one of the easiest interview questions to answer if you approach it properly.

2. in a way that is hard to discern or identify, or is not clear to the understanding:

   The end of the story made me wonder if Lila had only imagined the whole thing—a reading that felt obscurely troubling to me.

3. in a way that is not prominent or famous or that garners little public attention or importance:

   In the 17th century, the game of cricket grew up obscurely and locally as a game of the common people.

4. in a place that is out of the way and not easy to find or notice:

   The church is small and stands to one side of the village, rather obscurely.

   We trekked to an obscurely located arch of rock, hidden in a remote pocket of northern Arizona.

5. in a dim or murky way; faintly:

   In Poe’s poem, the “sad Soul” doomed to live in Dream-Land sees everything through “darkened glasses,” erroneously and obscurely.

Other Words From

• sub·ob·scure·ly adverb
• un·ob·scure·ly adverb

Word History and Origins

Origin of obscurely¹

obscure ( def ) + -ly

Example Sentences

Meanwhile, Mowers is facing a congressional ethics investigation for obscuring his past work for big pharmaceutical companies by illegibly writing that information on his disclosure forms.

From Washington Blade

Google’s recent, and future, applications of natural language processing and AI will be aimed at removing those tradeoffs so that it can serve relevant results, no matter how obscure a query might be or where on a site that information lives.

From Search Engine Land

The scams and subsequent law enforcement stings left a stench of disrepute on the broader crypto industry—one that has helped obscure the real progress made by ventures like Filecoin and Polkadot.

From Fortune

However, those averages could obscure dramatic changes in individual performance, if about half of winners continued to improve their performance while the other half returned to their previous level of performance.

From FiveThirtyEight

It catches grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes, from the most basic to the obscure.

From Popular-Science

Hamad said somewhat obscurely that he is moving “to another position” to serve “my homeland and its people.”

From The Daily Beast

Some 50 detectives are now poring over this paperwork in the obscurely named "Operation Weeting."

From The Daily Beast

And for the first time there crept into Rose's obscurely suffering soul, a fear and a jealousy of Mrs. Brodrick.

From Project Gutenberg

There might be logical causes, buried obscurely under remote events, for everything that had transpired.

From Project Gutenberg

At the beginning of Queen Mary's reign he had given up all his preferments and lived privately and obscurely.

From Project Gutenberg

We trace them obscurely under the denomination of "Seekers," their distinguishing principle being the doctrine of an inward light.

From Project Gutenberg

This simile is nobly conceived, but expressed somewhat obscurely.

From Project Gutenberg