Laughingly describes doing something while laughing, or doing something so easily that it seems like a joke. When your friend tells a funny story and laughingly admits she got lost on the way to school, she's talking while actually laughing about it. The memory makes her laugh even as she describes what happened.

The word also means doing something with such ease that it barely counts as effort. A skilled chess player might laughingly defeat a beginner, winning so easily it's almost funny. When an Olympic sprinter laughingly wins a local race, the competition wasn't even close. In this sense, laughingly suggests something was so simple or one-sided that you could have done it while cracking jokes.

You'll also hear people say something was laughingly called a certain name, meaning the label is ridiculous or ironic. If someone describes a tiny storage closet as laughingly called an office, they mean calling it an office is almost a joke. The word captures that moment when reality is so far from the description that you can't help but laugh at the gap between them.