SUBTLY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does subtly mean? 

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

1. in a subtle manner

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

 Dictionary entry details 

• SUBTLY (adverb)

Sense 1

Meaning:

In a subtle manner

Context example:

late nineteenth-century French opera at its most beautiful, subtly romantic with a twilight melancholy

Pertainym:

subtle (difficult to detect or grasp by the mind or analyze)

 Context examples 

Subtly and unaware she grew toward him and closer to him, while he, sensing the growing closeness, longed to dare but was afraid.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Since then I have been honoured by his confidence, which has not prevented most of his plans going subtly wrong and five of his best agents being in prison.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The very simplicity of his reasoning was its strength, and his materialism was far more compelling than the subtly complex materialism of Charley Furuseth.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

However, capturing the protein’s multiple states in a crystal is challenging, and could potentially trap subtly misfolded or incorrect structures.

(Structural states of a brain receptor revealed, NIH)

These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or "puffs," lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet.

(Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years, NASA)

The effect on Lucy was not bad, for the faint seemed to merge subtly into the narcotic sleep.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

Because the icy moon is not perfectly spherical and because it goes slightly faster and slower during different portions of its orbit around Saturn the giant planet subtly rocks Enceladus back and forth as it rotates.

(Cassini Finds Global Ocean in Saturn's Moon Enceladus, NASA)

The hypothesis was that study participants’ memory-based assumptions about color — oranges are orange, strawberries are red — would subtly influence color selection under LPS lighting, with arbitrarily colored objects such as Legos serving as the control.

(Rosy health and sickly green: color associations play robust role in reading faces, National Institutes of Health)

It might be lingering bashfully on the icy outer edges of our solar system, hiding in the dark, but subtly pulling strings behind the scenes: stretching out the orbits of distant bodies, perhaps even tilting the entire solar system to one side.

(The Super-Earth that Came Home for Dinner, NASA)

She was subtly perturbed by it, and more than once, though she knew not why, it disrupted her train of thought with its delicious intrusion and compelled her to grope for the remainder of ideas partly uttered.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)