scarcely(ONLY JUST)
The writing on the tombstone was barely visible.墓碑上的文字看不大清楚了。
His wages are barely enough to keep body and soul together.他的工资仅够勉强糊口。
After paying for our travel costs, we barely broke even.
The council's provision for the elderly is barely adequate.
There was a barely perceptible movement in his right arm.他的右胳膊微微动了一下。

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Merely and barely
all
all of somethingidiom
at a pinchidiom
but
by a whiskeridiom
by inchesidiom
can ill afford (to do something)phrase
hardly
ill
inch
just
little
merely
merest
narrowly
nothing more thanidiom
only
pinch
scarcely
whisker

barely | American Dictionary

barely
adverb[ not gradable ]
us/ˈbeər·li/
by the smallest amount; only just:
There was barely enough room for the two of them.
The dark line of the mountains was barely visible against the night sky.

Examples of barely

barely
He had barely reached twenty when he was exiled and his formal education ended - except for whatever his father taught him.
They then proceed with a particular dwelling type, the choice of which, unlike planning antecedents up until the late 1950s, is barely consistent.
Barely able to talk, she phones the preschool to tell them she will soon pick up her child.
The remainder of the chapter discusses the historical development, provides two case studies on even and barely, and asks further questions.
Besides a great mass of formalists - barely interested in actual languages - the ' armchair ' typologists produce slight generalizations based on superficially gathered information.
The project of understanding the precise parameters of the role of theory has barely begun.
This left co-operative structures fragile, new social agents without resources, and the state's earlier commitment to emancipate the indigenous peasantry barely begun.
Combining these abstractions yields a small but highly generic toolkit whose power we have barely begun to explore.
The government was prepared to use force and persuasion to implement the reform in regions where state agencies had barely been present before.
Some of the ambitions, fears and aspirations of the 1960s, although still within living memory, now seem so distant as to be barely comprehensible.
This would amount to a rather ambitious comparative agenda that we have barely begun to explore.
In the depressed demographic circumstances of the fifteenth century, custom may barely have existed.
But differences of opinion are welcome on a subject on which the dust has barely settled.
At this pressure, this is also the shape of the incident pulse, because gas breakdown barely occurs.
As so often in premodern comedy, these are stage personae in barely fictionalized roles, their 'character' limited to their servant function.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.