Word.ws English Dictionary

all but

all but adverb: very nearly; everything short of. Most often precedes a verb or adjective.

Adverb

all but (not comparable)

  1. Very nearly; everything short of. Most often precedes a verb or adjective.
    • The food is all but finished.
    • A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights. [...] Now the Jedi are all but extinct.1977, George Lucas, Star Wars, spoken by Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness), 20th Century Fox
  2. Everything except. Typically precedes a noun or noun phrase.
    • All but three of the students skipped school the day of the parade.
    • In the event, higher sale proceeds were achieved by allowing EWS Railway to acquire all but Freightliner, which was sold as a management buy-out.2024 January 10, 'Industry Insider', “Success built on liberalisation and market freedom”, in RAIL, number 1000, page 69

all but meaning in Urdu

all but in Urdu

تقریباً, قریب قریب, گویا

Examples of all but in a sentence

  • I practice nightly, I try to keep ahead / This art of surfacing is all but dead1979, The Boomtown Rats, “Wind Chill Factor (Minus Zero)”, in The Fine Art of Surfacing:
  • Today, Britain’s manufacturing base has all but disappeared, working-class communities have disintegrated, unions have been neutered and the welfare state has begun to crumble.2013 September 28, Kenan Malik, “London Is Special, but Not That Special”, in New York Times, retrieved 28 Sep 2013:
  • Coal, the then-dominant traffic, has all but disappeared.2024 January 10, 'Industry Insider', “Success built on liberalisation and market freedom”, in RAIL, number 1000, page 69:

Synonyms of all but

Forms of all but

alternative formall-but

Questions about all but

What does all but mean?
All but means very nearly; everything short of. Most often precedes a verb or adjective.
What is all but in Urdu?
All but in Urdu is تقریباً, قریب قریب, گویا. See All but meaning in Urdu.
How do you use all but in a sentence?
I practice nightly, I try to keep ahead / This art of surfacing is all but dead
What part of speech is all but?
All but is an adverb.

Words near all but in the dictionary

  1. all bedlam broke loose
  2. all bets are off
  3. All Black
  4. All Blacks
  5. all bluff and bluster
  6. all but
  7. all but dissertation
  8. all but thesis
  9. All Cannings
  10. all caps
  11. all cats are beautiful

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: all but (page history and authors); all but (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-all but.wav.

Cite this entry: “all but.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/all_but. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.