When to use wrong or wrongly as adverbs?

Question

It seems that wrong is not only an adjective, but is also a proper adverb ("You're doing it wrong!", right?). There's, however, an adverb wrongly, which probably means the same thing.

Talking about adverbs, when does one use wrong or wrongly?

Answer 1

First, it bears noting that dictionaries have been reporting both wrong and wrongly as legitimate adverbs since Samuel Johnson's first Dictionary of the English Language (1756)—and the usage undoubtedly goes much farther back than that.

I suspect that the choice between wrong and wrongly is idiosyncratic at many points and involves a lot of overlap. Nevertheless, there are some cases where a great majority of native English speakers would almost certainly choose one over the other. For example, wrongly is surely the normal choice in a sentence such as this:

He wrong/wrongly interpreted the stranger's comment as an insult.

On the other hand, wrong seems clearly preferable in this case:

The victim never understood what he had done wrong/wrongly.

And again here:

Don't get me wrong/wrongly—I love okra when it isn't slimy and revolting.

Having said that, I acknowledge that shorter-form adverbs have grown more popular in recent years, as people have adopted adjective-lookalike forms in situations where teachers and commentators traditionally preferred -ly forms. In this connection, it's interesting that the same guy who approved an ad campaign based on the slogan "Think different" was also famous for telling people who had trouble with signal reception on his company's phone, "You're holding it wrong." I would have used differently in the first instance and wrong in the second, but I wouldn't argue that wrongly was wrong in the latter instance.