Learn English – Can you say “very thrilled”

grammarmeaningsingle-word-requestsword-choiceword-usage

I recently learned about strong adjectives and the fact that you shouldn't use "very" with them, because their definition already includes "very".

E.g., "thrilled" — i.e., very happy, you can't say "very thrilled" according to the rule I described above. But for some reason this link https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/thrilled provides this example:

I’m not very thrilled about having to do it again.

So, is the Macmillan dictionary wrong then?

Best Answer

"Very thrilled" is fine. Google Ngrams shows that it has been used for about a century, and hardly any of that usage is due to "not very thrilled".

Cf some similar phrases which are used even more often, e.g. "very excited" and "very tired".

Related Topic