legitimately

comparative more legitimately · superlative most legitimately

1. In a legitimate manner, properly, fair and square.

   Later, when we played King's Quest 2, I remember being legitimately terrified while inside Dracula's castle. Like, I had nightmares in 16 color EGA.

   2004 September 2, Emily Morganti, quoting Matthew Chapman, “Peasant’s Quest”, in adventuregamers.com, archived from the original on 23 Sep 2010

   4 more examples

   I bought the magazines, ran home after work, filmed myself flipping through the pages—half legitimately fangirling over the boys, half making fun of people like myself who fangirl over the boys.

   2015, Tyler Oakley, Binge, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN

   The patient, in saying 'that's the strange thing' is making explicit the fact that, in selecting the possibility of disturbed sleeping habits as a manifestation of anxiety, the counsellor has correctly or legitimately used the documentary method.

   2016, Text and talk as social practice, page 67

   During his hourlong tire fire of an interview . . . the sheer volume of breathtaking lies flippantly uttered by President Trump made it legitimately difficult to decide which one of them posed the most direct threat to American democracy.

   2017 January 26, Jay Willis, “Donald Trump Is Making Shameless Equivocation the Dominant Form of Political Discourse”, in GQ, archived from the original on 28 Jan 2017, retrieved 10 Feb 2017

   But, unlike those weapons, which could sustain high speeds in the 40s of knots in short bursts, the Type 93, whilst still being somewhat faster than them, could keep on trucking right out to 22,000 yards. At a more mundane 36 knots, it would run twice as far with its near-eleven-hundred-pound warhead. For the first time in the dreadnought era, a nation had a torpedo that could legitimately be fired, not only beyond the practical range of enemy guns, but also beyond the absolute range limits of practically any battleship gun then in service, at least in the slower speed setting, whilst also being near-invisible, due to the almost complete absence of exhaust gasses.

   2021 January 20, Drachinifel, 8:15 from the start, in Type 93 Long Lance Torpedo - Long Range Hole Poking Device, archived from the original on 01 Nov 2022

   Synonyms: genuinely, legally, validly, above a bit, actually, all things considered, as a matter of fact, by right