LENIENTLY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does leniently mean? 

• LENIENTLY (adverb)
  The adverb LENIENTLY has 1 sense:

1. in a permissively lenient manner

  Familiarity information: LENIENTLY used as an adverb is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• LENIENTLY (adverb)

Sense 1

Meaning:

In a permissively lenient manner

Synonyms:

laxly; leniently

Context example:

he felt incensed that Tarrant should have been treated so leniently given his crime

Pertainym:

lenient (tolerant or lenient)

 Context examples 

There was one person among his new acquaintance in Surry, not so leniently disposed.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

“A week,” I repeated, “and you may consider yourself to have been very leniently dealt with.”

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I had leisure to think, before the kitchen fire, of pretty little Emily's dread of death—which, added to what Mr. Omer had told me, I took to be the cause of her being so unlike herself—and I had leisure, before Peggotty came down, even to think more leniently of the weakness of it: as I sat counting the ticking of the clock, and deepening my sense of the solemn hush around me.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

The case might have been dealt leniently with, but the laws were more harshly administered thirty years ago than now, and on my twenty-third birthday I found myself chained as a felon with thirty-seven other convicts in ’tween-decks of the barque Gloria Scott, bound for Australia.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)