“Made It Home Safe” vs. “Made It Home Safely” – Correct Version

Adverbs are funny little things. We can use “safely” and “safe” to describe different verbs. They’re almost identical, but it would help to learn more about the forms so you can understand them better.

Is It “Made It Home Safe” Or “Made It Home Safely”?

“Made it home safely” is technically the only correct variation according to English rules. “Safely” is an adverb that modifies “made” here. However, native English speakers also use “made it home safe,” where “safe” is an adjective to describe the state of someone’s arrival.

Interestingly, using “safe” as an adverb is also acceptable. Informally, “safe” is synonymous with “safely,” and both are adverbial forms, meaning they can both modify “made” correctly.

What Does “Made It Home Safe” Mean?

You might benefit from looking into the two variations more. We’ll start with the adjective form (which can be informally considered an adverb).

“Made it home safe” means that we want someone to arrive home safe and unharmed. If they have a long journey ahead of them, or they’ve been out until late, we might use this phrase to hope they get home alright.

If we’re strictly sticking to common English rules, “made it home safe” is wrong. However, native speakers use it often, which shows that common rules can be skipped when they are not in common use by most native speakers.

Since spoken English has less dependence on the rules, we can always find ways to overlook specific things. The adverb “safely” can be shortened to “safe” whenever people want to use it in this way, so there is no reason why you can’t do this either.

Perhaps you’d benefit from checking these examples out:

1. I hope you made it home safe last night. I was really worried about you.
2. I did make it home safe, but I’ll be sure to text you sooner next time, so you don’t worry.
3. Arrive safe! I couldn’t think of anything worse than you getting into an accident out there.
4. Please tell me you got home safe? I need to know so that I can tell your mother you’re not part of the accident.
5. I did get home safe, but I’m glad you took the time to check in on me.
6. Get home safe, and make sure you text us as soon as you arrive! We don’t want a repeat of last time.
7. I’ll try to get home safe! You know what I’m like, though!

What Does “Made It Home Safely” Mean?

“Safely” is the grammatically correct variation, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only correct one.

We can use “made it home safely” when we want to make sure that someone is safe when they are traveling home. It’s a well wish to make sure that they don’t get into any trouble if they’re traveling for a long time.

“Safely” is an adverb, and since “made” is the verb of choice in the sentence, we can use the two to show that “safely” modifies the action of “making” something (i.e. going somewhere).

Here are some examples that should help you with this one:

1. I hope you made it home safely yesterday. Text me as soon as you get this, please.
2. Did you make it home safely or not? I need to know!
3. Arrive safely at your destination. I’ll be watching, so make sure you behave yourself.
4. I got home safely, but thank you for asking anyway.
5. I didn’t actually get home safely for once! There was a really bad accident on the roads.
6. He gets home safely all the time, so I don’t need to worry too much about his conduct.
7. Get home safely! I’ll be patiently waiting for your call!

Is “Made It Home Safe” Or “Made It Home Safely” Used The Most?

According to Google Ngram Viewer, “made it home safely” is the most common phrase of the two. Since it’s the one that sticks to English rules, it makes sense that it would be used in more written cases than “made it home safe.”

Nevertheless, this graph shows that both forms are correct.

Is It “Made It Safely Home” Or “Made It Home Safely”?

According to Google Ngram Viewer, it’s more common to say “made it home safely.” This is because we like to include the adverb toward the end of the phrase to really add the intended emphasis.

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