Word.ws English Dictionary

as often as not

as often as not prepositional phrase: more or less half of the time; on many occasions but not always; frequently.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) More or less half of the time; on many occasions but not always; frequently.
    • "[T]hese old people—there's no trusting them, Fred. . . . [Y]ou can't calculate upon 'em, and even then they deceive you just as often as not."1841, Charles Dickens, chapter 7, in The Old Curiosity Shop
    • "I am a man that tries to do his duty, and makes a mess of it as often as not."1896, Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Persons of the Tale”, in Fables

Examples of as often as not in a sentence

  • [I]f he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them.1910, H. G. Wells, chapter 7, in The History of Mr. Polly:
  • The hall porter said that, as often as not, the flat was untenanted.1918, Edgar Wallace, chapter 7, in The Man Who Knew:
  • As often as not, the perpetrators have been other Americans — motivated not by patriotism for a foreign flag, but by simple profit.2012 October 24, Eamon Javers, “Spies and Co.”, in New York Times, retrieved 29 Oct 2013:

Questions about as often as not

What does as often as not mean?
As often as not means more or less half of the time; on many occasions but not always; frequently.
How do you use as often as not in a sentence?
[I]f he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them.
What part of speech is as often as not?
As often as not is a prepositional phrase.

Words near as often as not in the dictionary

  1. as of
  2. as of late
  3. as of now
  4. as of right
  5. as of yet
  6. as often as not
  7. as old as Adam
  8. as old as Methuselah
  9. as old as time itself
  10. as one
  11. as one does

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: as often as not (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: en-au-as often as not.ogg.

Cite this entry: “as often as not.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/as_often_as_not. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.