☼ Concept Map

''apace'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

↩ 🔳 🔳 🔳

Primary

⁀➴

''apace'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260714000159-00-⌔

apace - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adverb

apace (not comparable)

  • Quickly, rapidly, with speed.
    • ✤ Construction of the new offices is proceeding apace.
    • ✤ Gallop apace, you fiery footed ſteedes,/Towards Phœbus lodging, ſuch a Wagoner/As Phaeton would whip you to the weſt,/And bring in Cloudie night immediately.1
    • ✤ Ow faire Hippolita, our nuptiall houre/Drawes on apace: foure happy daies bring in/Another Moon […]2
    • ✤ (To one, it is ten years of years… Yet now, and in this place,3
    • ✤ The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man, goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. […] Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements.4
    • ✤ Twilight was coming on apace and a star or two was already out, but the remains of the sunset could still be seen in the west.5
    • ✤ On the three major railway systems of Ireland, changeover to diesel traction has continued apace during the past year.6
    • ✤ Despite efforts to prevent it, officials say, the radicalisation of young Muslims living in Europe proceeds apace.7
  • ✤ … Yet now, and in this place,
  • ✤ Surely she leaned o’er me—her hair
    - ✤ Fell all about my face…
  • ✤ Nothing: the autumn fall of leaves.
    - ✤ The whole year sets apace.)

Etymology

From Middle English apās (“step by step, slowly; quickly, rapidly; at once, promptly”), from Old French à pas (“at a quick pace”).8

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA: /əˈpeɪs/
  • Audio (Australian): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -eɪs

Printed 2026-07-14.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. c. 1591–1595 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Romeo and Ivliet”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene ii], page 65: ↩

  2. c. 1595–1596 (date written), William Shakespeare, “A Midsommer Nights Dreame”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene i], page 145: ↩

  3. 1850, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Blessed Damozel, The Germ; reprinted in Poems [Collection of British and American Authors; 1380], copyright edition, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1873, OCLC 933409239, page 2, lines 19–24: ↩

  4. 1943, C[live] S[taples] Lewis, “The Abolition of Man”, in The Abolition of Man […], New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, published 1947, →OCLC, page 46: ↩

  5. 1954, C. S. Lewis, chapter 1, in The Horse and His Boy, Collins, published 1998: ↩

  6. 1958 May, “Diesel Railcars for Ireland”, in Railway Magazine, page 351: ↩

  7. 2017 August 20, “The Observer view on the attacks in Spain”, in The Observer ‎: ↩

  8. “apās, adv.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 13 January 2018; “apace”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022. ↩

Link to original

Secondary

• • •