Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by answering questions such as how, in what way, when, where, to what extent.
Modern linguists note that the term adverb has come to be used as a kind of "catch-all" category, used to classify words with various types of syntactic behavior, not necessarily having much in common except that they do not fit into any of the other available categories (noun, adjective, preposition, etc.).
[1] The English word adverb derives (through French) from Latin adverbium, from ad- ('to'), verbum ('word', 'verb'), and the nominal suffix - ium.
Other languages often have similar methods for deriving adverbs from adjectives (French, for example, uses the suffix -ment), or else use the same form for both adjectives and adverbs, as in German and Dutch, where for example schnell or snel, respectively, mean either "quick" or "quickly" depending on the context.
Where the meaning permits, adverbs may undergo comparison, taking comparative and superlative forms.
However, modern grammarians recognize that words traditionally grouped together as adverbs serve a number of different functions.
Some describe adverbs as a "catch-all" category that includes all words that do not belong to one of the other parts of speech.
For example, the only type of word that can be inserted in the following template to form a grammatical sentence is a noun: When this approach is taken, it is seen that adverbs fall into a number of different categories.