Intensifiers are words, generally adverbs, which are used to modify adjectives, verbs or –ed

participles as in:

I was deeply unhappy.

I absolutely agree.
He was completely soaked when he came back.

Roughly speaking, intensifiers can be put into three groups.

1. those that amplify adjectives:

Here is a list of common amplifiers used with adjectives:

1
amazingly especially hugely surprisingly
awfully exceedingly incredibly suspiciously
bitterly extremely particularly terribly
critically greatly really unbelievably
dangerously highly remarkably very
deeply hopelessly seriously violently
dreadfully horribly strikingly wonderfully

2
His lecture was incredibly boring.
Tom tends to be hugely irresponsible, so I wouldn’t count on him.

2. intensifiers that are used to down-tone the effect of an adjective.

Some examples of down-toners are:

faintly mildly pretty rather slightly

fairly moderately quite reasonably somewhat

3
They were mildly surprised when they found out the results.
She is pretty well organised.

3. intensifiers that indicate the extent of the quality you are describing, i.e. give an idea
of its ‘totality’:

4
almost nearly absolutely purely
exclusively partly altogether quite
fully predominantly completely simply
largely primarily entirely totally
mainly roughly perfectly utterly
mostly

5
I am nearly finished.
I largely agree with her ideas for the wedding, but the one about the clown is completely
ridiculous.
The intensifiers in groups 1 and some of the ones from group 2 can be useful to express your
opinion. The ones in group 3 feel more neutral. We can see this when we compare the
following examples:

Example A

1. The house was suspiciously dark.

(The house was dark. My opinion was that that was suspicious.)

2. The house was rather dark.

(The house was dark, not very dark, but I had a negative opinion about the darkness, and it
was darker than I had expected.)

3. The house was completely dark.

(The lights were all off. No opinion about this was given).

Example B

1. The message was unbelievably personal.

(I found it hard to believe how personal that message was)

2. The message was rather personal.

(The message was more personal than it should have been in my opinion)

3. The message was mostly personal.

(more than half of the message contained personal information)

Note that in group 3, the intensifiers in the left column are mainly used to indicate the extent
of quality only, while those in the right column also emphasize the adjective. Compare:

6
National efforts to deal with globalisation fully National efforts to deal with globalisation utterly
depend on an international understanding and depend on an international understanding and
priority of the Decent Work Agenda. priority of the Decent Work Agenda.

The intensifiers in group 3 tend to be followed by ‘stronger’ words -which express

maximum and minimum qualities- e.g. useless, unacceptable, essential, unique, right.

Those from groups 1 and 2 tend to go with words that express qualities that can be
graded and don’t reach a maximum (e.g. hot: it can always get hotter): happy,
strange, surprising, tired.

This explains why certain combinations are right or wrong:

X absolutely angry X very superb.

X completely tired. X fairly wonderful.
X totally small.
√ totally essential √ very unusual
√ totally unique √ extremely nice
√ totally illegal √ fairly quiet