jolly well

English

Adverb

jolly well (not comparable)

1. (UK, dated, emphatic, sometimes humorous) Certainly, very well.

   You jolly well deserved it.

   • 1904, Edith Nesbit, The New Treasure Seekers, Chapter 1:

     We never had a Christmas in the country before. It was simply ripping. And the long-lost love—her name was Miss Ashleigh, but we were allowed to call her Aunt Margaret even before the wedding made it really legal for us to do so—she and her jolly clergyman brother used to come over, and sometimes we went to the Cedars, where they live, and we had games and charades, and hide-and-seek, and Devil in the Dark, which is a game girls pretend to like, and very few do really, and crackers and a Christmas-tree for the village children, and everything you can jolly well think of.

   • 1920, Eric Leadbitter, Rain Before Seven, page 122:

     "Oh, I shall pull it off. I shall jolly well have to succeed," said Michael light-heartedly; feeling unusually confident.

   • 1991, Stephen Fry, The Liar, London: Heinemann, →OCLC, page 37:

     Adrian thought it worth while to try out his new slang... ‘That's beastly talk, Thompson. Jolly well take it back or expect a good scragging.’

   • 2022 April 6, Philip Haigh, “Passenger numbers increase... and freight must follow”, in RAIL, number 954, page 51:

     For most main lines, that's one or two extra trains every hour. "We jolly well ought to be able to encompass that on a lot of lines," he suggests.

References

• “jolly well”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.