mainly

adverb

chiefly; principally; for the most part; in the main; to the greatest extent: Our success was due mainly to your efforts. The audience consisted mainly of students.

Obsolete. greatly; mightily; abundantly.

Origin:
1225–75; Middle English maynliche, maynly. See main¹, -ly

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World English Dictionary

mainly (ˈmeɪnlɪ)

—*adv*
1.	for the most part; to the greatest extent; principally
2.	obsolete strongly; very much

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
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Mainly is always a great word to know.

So is gobo. Does it mean:

a screen or mat covered with a dark material for shielding a camera lens from excess light or glare.

a calculus or concretion found in the stomach or intestines of certain animals, esp. ruminants, formerly reputed to be an effective remedy for poison.

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Word Origin & History

mainly

late 13c., "vigorously," from main (adj.). Meaning "For the most part" is from 1660s.

Example sentences

Milk had been part of our one-block feasts from the start-mainly for cheese.

Until recently, he said, science has been concerned mainly with things-external

reality.

Thanks mainly to keener instruments and more powerful computers, forecasters

are extending their reach into the uncertain future.

Living up to their name, lesser pandas are about as small as large housecats

and keep a low profile, foraging mainly by night.

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Matching Quote

"Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do—bats and dolphins, for instance—seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze."

-Diane Ackerman

mainly

main·ly