Very, very — a formal way of turning up a describing word: exceedingly rare, exceedingly difficult, exceedingly polite. It is close to extremely in meaning, but it sounds older and more careful, the voice of a report, a legal document, or a nineteenth-century novel. Because of that flavour, native speakers today also use it lightly, half-joking, to sound grand: "an exceedingly good cake". (A famous British advert for Mr Kipling cakes used exactly that line, which is why it sounds funny to British ears.) It goes in front of adjectives and adverbs, not in front of nouns or verbs — exceedingly slow, exceedingly slowly, but never "I exceedingly like it". In everyday speech, really or so does the same job with none of the stiffness.