at large
Cultural-
Free, unconfined, especially not confined in prison, as in To our distress, the housebreakers were still at large . [1300s]
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At length, fully; also, as a whole, in general. For example, The chairman talked at large about the company's plans for the coming year , or, as Shakespeare wrote in Love's Labour's Lost (1:1): “So to the laws at large I write my name” (that is, I uphold the laws in general). This usage is somewhat less common. [1400s]
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Elected to represent an entire group of voters rather than those in a particular district or other segment—for example, alderman at large , representing all the wards of a city instead of just one, or delegate at large to a labor union convention . [Mid-1700s]
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.
The distillation attacks — attempts to maliciously extract the intellectual property of a high-performing AI model — come at a pivotal moment for Anthropic and the AI industry at large.
From MarketWatch
“We help about 1,400 families a month and we plucked out who had experience at large financial institutions that we could learn from, and culled records from at least a thousand,” said Walter.
From MarketWatch
Intervention by the governor and community mediation efforts restored a fragile peace to the area, but the instigators of the violence remain at large.
From Barron's
For U.S. companies and the economy at large, that means one thing: a lot more trade uncertainty.
In most cases, a PPA adds renewable energy to the grid at large, helping to decarbonize a country’s energy system overall.
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.
