innocently
/ˈɪnəs(ə)ntli
/adverb
1Without guilt for a crime or offence: the lawyer says that his client was acting innocently...
- "I was scared that if I stopped I wouldn't be able to start the car up again," he explained innocently.
- "I ain't got it!" the accused boy proclaimed as innocently as he could.
- Another serious allegation against him is one of misleading others, innocently or culpably, over the contract.
2Without responsibility for or direct involvement in an event yet suffering its consequences: he was shot at through a window while innocently walking past the house...
- It was the slapstick premise of a woman who's innocently walking down the street when a harp flails out of a window and lands on her.
- He humbly suffers visitations of beings from another world and is innocently drawn into a bizarrely conceived plot for political change.
- Some friends and I were innocently collecting conkers, when suddenly the owner arrived on the scene with a gun in his hand.
3In a manner that is uncorrupted or free from moral wrong: a charming tale with children innocently singing the chorus...
- It offsets a studio photo portrait of an innocently luscious teenage girl with a <i>Gourmet</i> magazine cover featuring ripe pomegranates.
- The tale is innocently romantic without a tinge of irony.
- Whenever she is able to keep her hysterics in check, it sounds as if she's trying to present herself as innocently doe-eyed as possible.
3.1In a simple or naive manner: many people innocently believe that they’re safe from credit card fraud...
- Everyone looked like a dog's dinner and innocently believed that pop would always laugh with us rather than at us.
- He innocently believes that one's life can be arranged as simply and beautifully as one's house.
- These places are "so innocently confident in their excesses," she says, that they give her "permission to exaggerate, invent, and obsess."
4With no intention of causing harm or offence: my cab driver innocently asked me what I did for a living...
- The errors, I think, were innocently caused by the prism of memory bending facts.
- He innocently tells her he was ignorant of the rule.
- Nina innocently calls upon her reality-bending powers with the best of intentions, to help her friend land the guy of her dreams.