Word.ws English Dictionary

nothing for it

nothing for it noun: no alternative; nothing else to be done or to have recourse to.

Noun

nothing for it (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic, often preceded by there + be and followed by but) No alternative; nothing else to be done or to have recourse to.
    • "You will allow there was nothing for it after this but paying honest Joe Hodges's bill and departing."1815 February 24, [Walter Scott], chapter 21, in Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Longman, Hurst, Rees...
    • I (whatever the others might do) saw nothing for it but to comply.1852 March – 1853 September, Charles Dickens, chapter 5, in Bleak House, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1853, →OCLC

Examples of nothing for it in a sentence

  • So there was nothing for it only to stay the night or to foot it out.1916, James Joyce, chapter I, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, N.Y.: B[enjamin] W. Huebsch, →OCLC, page 5:
  • There's nothing for it but to go forward, whether we know where we're going or not.2010 June 25, Carolyn See, “Book World: Vendela Vida's The Lovers”, in Washington Post, retrieved 05 May 2015:

Forms of nothing for it

alternative formnothing else for it

Questions about nothing for it

What does nothing for it mean?
Nothing for it means no alternative; nothing else to be done or to have recourse to.
How do you use nothing for it in a sentence?
So there was nothing for it only to stay the night or to foot it out.
What part of speech is nothing for it?
Nothing for it is a noun.

Words near nothing for it in the dictionary

  1. nothing but net
  2. nothing could be farther from the truth
  3. nothing could be further from the truth
  4. nothing doing
  5. nothing else for it
  6. nothing for it
  7. nothing gold can stay
  8. nothing if not
  9. nothing is certain but death and taxes
  10. nothing is said that has not been said before
  11. nothing less than

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nothing for it (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-nothing for it.ogg.

Cite this entry: “nothing for it.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nothing_for_it. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.