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Can one comfortably say in English "a lowly profitable company"?

My research indicates that there are almost no instances of this usage. My guess is that, maybe, it is awkward to combine "lowly" with "profitable", because the concepts are antagonistic.

Native speakers: Does the expression seem perfectly fine to you?

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    Only people or their circumstances can be lowly. – Lambie Feb 01 '23 at 15:07
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    What do you mean? A company which is lowly (unimportant, not grand) but profitable, or a company that makes a small profit, or that makes almost no profit? – Stuart F Feb 01 '23 at 16:04
  • You could also simply say "unprofitable" – DJMcMayhem Feb 02 '23 at 06:13
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    @DJMcMayhem, I don't think that "unprofitable" is the intent here. "Barely profitable" perhaps, but certainly making some profit. "Unprofitable" means loss-making, or (at best) break-even. – Toby Speight Feb 02 '23 at 09:05
  • But this combination is used frequently in economic analysis reports that you can see for yourself https://www.google.ie/search?q=%22lowly-profitable%22&biw=1920&bih=907&sxsrf=AJOqlzVh-J7zFe8XZmlaIDuUt8XTUrQ81Q%3A1675335081254&ei=qZXbY_WTD475gQb3gJSYDg&ved=0ahUKEwi1jJfD1fb8AhWOfMAKHXcABeM4ChDh1QMIDg&uact=5&oq=%22lowly-profitable%22&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQAzIFCAAQogQyBQgAEKIEOgoIABBHENYEELADSgQIQRgASgQIRhgAUJ4GWMUJYOEOaAFwAXgAgAGvAogBzgOSAQcwLjEuMC4xmAEAoAEByAEDwAEB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp and its meaning is as you would think. So it's well understood in the financial context at least. – Trunk Feb 02 '23 at 10:57
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    keep it simple: "low-profit company" perfectly fine, even if it may not be 100% grammatically correct, no native english speaker will even think twice about it. – ldog Feb 02 '23 at 17:52
  • What research? Please indicate it. For example, if you searched Google Books Ngrams, then saying so may prevent other people from looking in the same place, thus saving them time and effort. – MarcInManhattan Feb 02 '23 at 20:55
  • You are correct that the concepts don't align and this causes awkwardness. In English, the easiest way to deal with that situation is by inserting the word 'yet' to show awareness of the antagonism: "... a lowly, yet profitable company" is perfectly fine. – mcalex Feb 03 '23 at 02:58
  • Just my two cents... I'm not a native English speaker. I would understand this as: (Lowly) an unimportant or little known company (unlike, lets say Apple) - but still profitable despite this. – Baard Kopperud Feb 03 '23 at 03:51
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    the answer is simply no. don't confuse the OP. – Fattie Feb 03 '23 at 15:41
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    @Trunk: Your comment surprised me, so I followed the "lowly-profitable" link. The first two results from Google are both for this ELL question, the third is a bad French translation, and most of the others on the first page are obviously not from native Anglophones. And there's only one more page, with half-a-dozen results which again seem to be from mostly non-Anglophone sources. It's not really "English". – FumbleFingers Mar 13 '23 at 19:22
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    @FumbleFingers I take your point on the small return of the Google search for this phrase. It is dwarfed by a Google search using "low profitability". Yet a search using "low profitability company" only racks up 4 pages . . . – Trunk Mar 13 '23 at 22:03

5 Answers5

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There's actually a grammatical problem here. I'm assuming you want to describe a company that has a low profit. Your intention is to link lowly and profitable to produce the idea that the company is making almost no profit at all.

The idea is perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong about referring to a word and then qualifying it with contrasting words. ("They had a chaotic plan." "It was an almost tasteless flavour.")

However, the word you have chosen, lowly, is a tricky English word. It looks like an adverb with the -ly ending, but it's actually an adjective with a fairly specific meaning. It means low born, humble, ordinary, as in these examples from Collins:

  • He was a man of lowly birth, unlike the princess.
  • He was just a lowly photographer.

So what words would be better? You could say:

  • a barely profitable company
  • a company that was only just profitable.
  • a company that made very little profit.
  • a minimally profitable company
RonJohn
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Peter Kirkpatrick
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    Did you check some dictionaries? A number of them do define it as an adverb as well, like dictionary.com or Merriam-Webster. – stangdon Feb 01 '23 at 15:49
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    Learners would mostly be better off not knowing about adverbial *lowly = in a low manner. It's a very uncommon usage, and I suspect most native speakers today would much prefer He speaks low and slow* rather than He speaks lowly and slowly** (even without the irrelevant alliteration! :) – FumbleFingers Feb 01 '23 at 18:42
  • This phrase is often used in financial/economic contexts. – Trunk Feb 02 '23 at 22:59
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    I don't know about "often". When I Google "lowly profitable", I only get about 10 hits actually using the phrase to mean "making low profits". Everything else is either this question, Stack Exchange pages with this question in the HNQ sidebar, or Stack Exchange scrapers. – user2357112 Feb 03 '23 at 04:09
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    The Google Books Ngram Viewer also has literally zero occurences of "lowly profitable". – user2357112 Feb 03 '23 at 04:11
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    lowly (in a low manner) is commonplace. this answer correctly alerts the OP to it - but yes, it's worth adding as addendum that it's a slightly archaic term the OP should ignore (as well as, the actual point of the QA, that it's completely wrong to use as a modifier for "profit"). – Fattie Feb 03 '23 at 15:45
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    @Trunk - your statement is completely wrong, or, I've misunderstand what you mean. – Fattie Feb 03 '23 at 15:45
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If you are trying to talk about a company that does not make a lot of profit, I would say a

marginally profitable company

Kevin
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  • This is a nice alternative but not what OP asked for. They asked (twice) if a phrase was something a native speaker might use. – Colm Feb 03 '23 at 10:51
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    "Answers" like this are incredibly unhelpful on ELL. Please delete it. The norm on this site is to use comments, for "alternate suggestions regarding something mentioned on the page" – Fattie Feb 03 '23 at 15:46
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The word "lowly" isn't typically used as an adverb from the adjective "low"; it's most often used as an adjective to describe something low in status or importance.

If you mean that the company doesn't make a profit, you would call it an unprofitable company. If it makes only a small profit, you would call it a low-margin company.

alphabet
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    I see that Merriam-Webster says that lowly does mean "in a low position, manner, or degree", but I feel like it's so rarely used that way that it's better avoided. – stangdon Feb 01 '23 at 14:47
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    You sometimes see "lowly" used of worms, snakes, and other animals that go along the ground (I suspect this goes back to some religious text), but that's probably the only time it would be used to mean low in position or degree (and even then it probably has some sense that the worm is lowly in both status and physical position). – Stuart F Feb 01 '23 at 16:06
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    low-margin doesn't necessarily mean it makes only a small profit. A company can make a large profit it has a low margin but high revenue. – bdsl Feb 02 '23 at 13:08
  • @bdsl While margin is not equal to total profits, it takes very high volume for a low-margin product to produce high profits, so it's unusual. The implication is usually clear. – Barmar Feb 02 '23 at 15:33
  • Fair enough. My thought was companies that deal with things like fast moving consumer goods are likely to have low margins but may have high profits. – bdsl Feb 02 '23 at 17:38
  • This sentence "The word "lowly" isn't typically used as an adverb... is incorrect. This sentence: "The word "lowly" is not used as an adverb ..." is correct. EVERY statement about spelling and usage in every world language, can be microscopically qualified with "except in extremely unusual and bizarre cases". On this site it's correct to just state "Elephant IS spelled elephant" or "lowly is not an adverb". – Fattie Feb 03 '23 at 15:48
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That's fine to say, if that's what you mean. In this case "lowly" wins, meaning that being profitable isn't good enough. You could say Sam Walmart wanted to dominate retail, and wouldn't settle for running a lowly profitable company.

In a similar way, you might say a actor is merely pretty -- since most actors are much more than pretty. Or Stan might be the lowly millionaire at a yacht party, since everyone else is a billionaire.

Owen Reynolds
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    This implies that Sam Walton ran something that wasn't a profitable company. I don't know what that would be, but it must be something that makes all profitable companies look "lowly". On the other hand a millionaire among billionaires would be "lowly", so that example works. – David K Feb 02 '23 at 03:54
  • @DavidK Yes! Walmart makes other profitable companies look lowly, since it's super-mega profitable. We think of mildly good words like "profitable" or "pretty" or "millionaire" in 2 ways. One is "X or better", but that's often the wrong way: Sam Walton was a millionaire? Daniel Craig is pretty? Tom Brady is an above average quarterback? We more often think of them as points, followed by better things and say "Amazon isn't some lowly profitable company -- it's a money-sucking behemoth". – Owen Reynolds Feb 02 '23 at 15:05
  • If you wanted to say the being profitable isn't good enough, then I think it would be better phrased as "Sam Walmart wanted to dominate retail, and wouldn't settle for merely running a profitable company." – Kevin Feb 02 '23 at 15:28
  • I think the Amazon example may work (though perhaps not for everyone) as a kind of play on words. You might be able to do something similar with Walmart. The joke is that ordinarily the terms "profitable" and "unprofitable" divide companies into just two classes (although there are more specific terms that can subdivide companies further), but you are describing a company that is so extraordinarily successful that it cannot even fit in the class of profitable companies. – David K Feb 02 '23 at 17:58
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    I think this answer has been unfairly dismissed: using 'lowly' like this would be appropriate to compare a company that was merely profitable to something like Amazon, thereby implying that Amazon also wields significant power. It is not enough to be merely profitable; you must also be the lord of a fiefdom. – Merus Feb 03 '23 at 04:49
  • @Merus I think there's this tension in ELL over complexity -- things such as "lowly profitable" which are proper, but only in specific contexts which a non-native speaker might have trouble understanding. Do we reduce "use with caution" to simply "no"? (of course, some people are reading the Q differently, thinking OP confused lowly with some other word). – Owen Reynolds Feb 03 '23 at 16:40
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Chambers Dictionary says that lowly is solely an adjective meaning small in stature or organisation. It also says that the adverb from low is lowlily.

Oxford Concise says lowly is both an adjective and adverb, the adverbial form having a derivative, lowlily. Lowly is connoted with a meaning of small in amount, e.g. the men were on lowly wages.

So Oxford Concise would therefore support the phrase as used by the OP while Chambers seems not to.

So much for dictionaries. In everyday usage the OP phrase - rightly or wrongly - is seen used in appropriate contexts like financial or economic reports.

Trunk
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