all the
Idioms-
Even, more so, as in Painting the room white will make it all the lighter , or They liked her all the better for not pretending , or You don't care for dessert? Good, all the more for us . Used to underscore a comparison, this idiom was used by Shakespeare in As You Like It (1:2): “All the better; we shall be the more marketable.” [Late 1500s] For a synonym, see so much the .
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The entire amount of, as in These cousins were all the family he had . In this usage all the is short for all of the . [Ninth century a.d. ]
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
“I don’t think anybody has all the answers. But that’s no excuse not to begin the journey.”
Speaking Sunday from the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV made a “heartfelt appeal to all the parties involved to assume the moral responsibility of halting the spiral of violence before it becomes an unbridgeable chasm.”
From Los Angeles Times
He said he thought the decision to pick up the hoses was made before his shift — though he was “not 100 percent sure” — and that it was a “collaborative decision, based off all the information that was received.”
From Los Angeles Times
He was asked by a plaintiffs’ attorney: “Any dialogue with anyone else that you haven’t told me about concerning any of the work that was being done up there at the Lachman fire site, in terms of checking for smokers? Making sure that you got all the hose? Anything like that?”
From Los Angeles Times
The first is the state of the economy, including above all the cost of living.
From BBC
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
