Awfully is an adverb that creates some interesting confusion because it has two nearly opposite meanings depending on how you use it.

Most commonly today, awfully means very or extremely, often in a positive or neutral way. When your grandmother says you've grown awfully tall, she means you've grown very tall. If something takes an awfully long time, it takes a really long time. If you're awfully hungry after soccer practice, you're extremely hungry. In this usage, awfully is just an intensifier that adds emphasis, like saying “really” or “super.”

Over time, awful shifted to mean terrible or bad. But oddly, when people started using awfully to intensify things, they didn't limit it to bad situations. You might say “That's awfully nice of you” or “You're awfully good at chess.”

Occasionally, awfully still carries its connection to awful and means terribly or dreadfully. If someone behaves awfully, they behave very badly. But this usage is less common in everyday conversation.

The key is context: awfully usually just means “very,” but pay attention to what follows it to know whether it's intensifying something good, bad, or neutral.