TO BE + adjective – English Grammar Profiler

Here are the top 100 examples of how ‘TO BE adjective” are used in English.

These come from a search in iWeb corpus for

* TO BE _JJ

1 NEED TO BE AWARE OF 16993

We need to be aware of the data and information that we’re giving.

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2 . TO BE HONEST, 14943

To be honest, I don’t know if race relations will improve in America.

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‘to be honest‘ is very common in the initial position as a ‘comment adverbial phrase’.  So we did another search in NOW corpus for adverbs with:

. To be _RR honest ,

1 . TO BE PERFECTLY HONEST, 187

To be perfectly honest, I also thought he looked a little scared.

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2 . TO BE COMPLETELY HONEST, 127
3 . TO BE BRUTALLY HONEST, 60 (C2+ unlisted and there are other grammar points that relate to this)

To be brutally_honest, I don’t care.

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4 . TO BE TOTALLY HONEST, 47 5 . TO BE REALLY HONEST, 22 6 . TO BE ENTIRELY HONEST, 11

7 . TO BE ABSOLUTELY HONEST, 6

Because adding an adverb lifts the complexity of this phrase it is at least B2.

3 TO BE HONEST, 12805 4 TO BE FAIR, 9093

100 MEANS TO BE HUMAN . 1201