Word.ws English Dictionary

all that glitters

all that glitters is the ellipsis of all that glitters is not gold.

Meaning of all that glitters is not gold

Proverb

all that glitters is not gold

  1. Things that appear valuable or worthwhile might not actually be so; things that appear nice might not be as good as they appear.
    • All that gliſters is not gold,
      Often haue you heard that told, […]c. 1596–1598 (date written), W[illiam] Shakespeare, The Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice. […] (First Quarto), [London]: […] J[ames] Roberts [for Thomas Heyes], published 1600, →OCLC, [Act...

Questions about all that glitters

What is all that glitters the ellipsis of?
All that glitters is the ellipsis of all that glitters is not gold.

Words near all that glitters in the dictionary

  1. all talk, no show
  2. all that
  3. all that and a bag of chips
  4. all that and a bag of potato chips
  5. all that glisters is not gold
  6. all that glitters
  7. all that glitters is not gold
  8. all that jazz
  9. all that one's life is worth
  10. all that one's life's worth
  11. all that said

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: all that glitters (page history and authors); all that glitters is not gold (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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Cite this entry: “all that glitters.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/all_that_glitters. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.