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"Short" and "brief" are synonyms; an event that is "short" or "brief" occurs for a short period of time. Yet "shortly" and "briefly" are not synonyms; an event that shall occur "shortly" shall occur in a short time, while an event that shall occur briefly shall occur for a brief period of time.

The meaning of "briefly" follows the normal rule for forming adverbs from adjectives, but the meaning of "shortly" does not. That is:

  • If I stare lecherously, that means my staring is lecherous
  • If I devour greedily, that means my devouring is greedy
  • If a building collapses spectacularly, that means its collapsing is spectacular
  • If I will visit briefly, that means my visiting will be brief, BUT...
  • If I will visit shortly, that does NOT mean my visiting will be short, which breaks the pattern

How, and when, did this puzzling state of affairs come to be? It's not even as though English lacks other words to express the meaning "shortly" has - we have the perfectly good words "soon" and "imminently", after all - so how and why did people ever even begin to use "shortly" in this seemingly illogical manner?

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    Some days I wear both shorts and briefs Commented 12 hours ago
  • Briefly also meant "soon" at least from c1460–1616 according to the OED. Shortly had both senses in Old English, and it's not clear exactly what it meant in Proto-Germanic, so it's a leap to assume the original meaning was "small in size"; it may come from a PIE root meaning something like cut or trim but that's far from certain. And don't get people started on presently (there are several existing questions). Commented 12 hours ago
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    If I stare hard at you, I am not hardly staring. Commented 12 hours ago
  • Asking for logic within English, good luck. But shortly already holds the basic definition of soon, so it's not a distortion. And if it were a distortion, native speakers accept it for its current meaning of before long. Commented 11 hours ago
  • There are ly words that aren't adverbs and there are lots of adverbs that don't have ly. Commented 9 hours ago

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One should look at the origins and changes in meanings of both 'short' and 'shortly'.

From the Online Etymological Dictionary:

short (adj.):

Middle English short, from Old English sceort, scort, "of little length; not tall; of brief duration," ... probably from Proto-Germanic **skurta*- (source also of Old Norse skorta "to be short of," skort "shortness;" Old High German scurz "short"), from PIE root *sker- (1) "to cut," on the notion of "something cut off."

And the old senses have persisted (and others, often zero-derivation nouns, added, as with the electrical fault and the stiff drink).

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Again from Etymon:

shortly(adv.)

Middle English shortli, "for a brief time," from Old English scortlice "briefly," also, in late Old English, "in short time; concisely;" see short (adj.) + -ly (2). By 1815 as "curtly, abruptly."

So the original meaning of 'shortly' seems to be 'for a brief duration' rather than 'not too long in the future'.

This does not tell us, though, where the now default meaning, 'not too long in the future' (note that Collins for instance licenses the 'for a brief duration' as still being an acceptable secondary sense) gained the ascendency.

However, Wiktionary tells us that the 'soon' sense was always available, even in Old English:

From Middle English schortly, schortliche, from Old English sċortlīċe (“shortly; before long; soon”), equivalent to short +‎ -ly

(It also adds a third sense, 'snappily'. 'Concisely' is a smallish broadening from 'not speaking at length'; 'speaking briefly'.)

The default meaning is almost certainly 'soon' nowadays, though context can help disambiguate in many cases. It is not unusual for synonyms to develop different though related default meanings where this is convenient. 'Shortly' has gone one way while 'briefly' has stayed with the earlier sense as default.

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  • Some natural followup questions: did Old English's "sceort"/"scort" definitely have only the same meaning as modern English's "short", or did it perhaps have a secondary meaning "imminent" that died out (leaving "shortly" as the adverb form of a dead meaning of the underlying adjective)? And were the general rules that today govern the meaning of adverbs formed with "-ly" already established in Old and Middle English (for adverbs formed with "-lice" or "-li", or is a possible explanation for the rule violation I perceive that the rule simply didn't exist when the word emerged? Commented 12 hours ago
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    Note that Etymon and Wiktionary give different senses for the OE word scortlice/sċortlīċe. This means that there is lack of certainty about the earliest usage, never mind how the fight for default sense status developed over the years. As literacy developed, there being no real central editorial board, the way common words would be used across England would not be uniform. Commented 9 hours ago
  • And then there’s skort n.: A pair of shorts having a flap across the front to give the appearance of a skirt (OED) Commented 2 hours ago
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This meaning of "shortly" goes way back, it existed in Old English. The earliest dated attestation in the OED is from 1325, but there are older OE examples without dates.

At that time it could also be used to mean briefly, but this meaning has become rare after Middle English.

I don't see any particular reason why "for a short time" should inherently be preferred over "in a short time" as the meaning. It's pretty arbitrary which one eventually took over, and things like this happen organically -- it would be difficult to pinpoint a reason.

Adverbs don't always follow the pattern you describe. Another example of a deviation is "happily": if I will do something happily, it means I will be happy to do it, not that I will do it in a happy manner.

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    I don't think "happily" breaks the pattern; the "verb-link adjective" "happy" can mean "very willing" (as in the phrase "happy to do it" you use in this very answer), so it is logical that one possible meaning of "happily" is "very willingly". Rather the irregularity of "happy"/"happily" in this sense, I think, is that the adjective form mysteriously cannot be used predicatively. That is, if I am "willing to come", then I "come willingly", I can (awkwardly, but grammatically) say "my coming was willing", but if I am "happy to come", & "come happily", I cannot say "my coming was happy". Commented 13 hours ago

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