Words like busily, hard, late, here, well, now, inside, and more, show how, when, where and how much the men work.
We could leave off these words and still have a sentence, since the other words make sense without them, but these words describe the action expressed in the verb.
Words used in this way are called adverbs because they are added to verbs to make our meaning more definite, very much as adjectives are added to nouns.
280. The word adverb means, literally, to the verb, and one would suppose from this name that the adverb was strictly a verb modifier, but an adverb is used to modify other words as well. An adverb may be used to modify an adjective; for example, we might say: The man was very busy. This lesson is too long. Here very and too are added to the adjectives busy and long to qualify their meaning.
281. You remember in the comparison of adjectives, we used the words more and most to make the comparative and superlative degrees. Here more and most are adverbs used with the adjectives to qualify their meaning. Adverbs used in this way will always answer the question, how much, how long, etc. In the sentence, The man is very busy, very is used to answer the question how busy. And in the sentence, The lesson is too long, the adverb too answers the question how long.
An adverb is also added to another adverb sometimes to answer the question how. For example; we say, The man works very hard. Here the adverb hard tells how the man works and very modifies the adverb hard, and answers the question how hard. So we have our definition of an adverb:
282. An adverb is a word that modifies the meaning of a verb, an adjective or another adverb.
Remember that adjectives are used only with nouns or pronouns, but the adverb may be used with a verb or an adjective or another adverb. You remember that we had in our first lesson, as the definition of a word, that, a word is a sign of an idea. The idea is a part of a complete thought. See how all of these various words represent ideas, and each does its part to help us express our thoughts.
HOW TO TELL ADVERBS
283. We need not have much difficulty in always being able to tell which words in a sentence are adverbs, for they will always answer one of the following questions: How? When? Where? Why? How long? How often? How much? How far? or How little? etc. Just ask one of these questions and the word that answers it is the adverb in your sentence. Take the following sentence: