Scarcely (6)
(Other definitions for barely that I've seen before include "Not quite" , "By a small margin" , "Just about, nothing to spare" , "how babies are born?" , "just a short while before" .)
<span class="explanation-format__ClueExplanation">'<span class="explanation-format__original">scarcely</span>' is the definition.<br/ ><span class="explanation-format__explanation">(I know that scarcely can be written as hardly)</span><br/ ><br/ >This is all the clue.<br/ ></span>
(Other definitions for hardly that I've seen before include "With great difficulty" , "Almost not" , "Barely, scarcely" , "Not much" , "Not quite "It seems unlikely!"" .)