What is the difference between presently and shortly? They seem to have rather similar meanings.
Learn English – Difference between “presently” and “shortly”
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Best Answer
Presently has two meanings: currently and shortly. So, one difference is that shortly does not mean currently. Otherwise they mean pretty much the same thing.
Ngrams shows that shortly is more common than presently. If we take into account the fact that the results are context-agnostic and the fact that a fair portion of the uses of presently found by Ngrams was in the sense of currently, we can conclude that in the sense of soon the word shortly is far more common than presently.