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altogether

adverbnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɔːl.tʊˈɡɛð.ə(ɹ)//
  • United Kingdom//ɔː.tuːˈɡɛð.ə(ɹ)//
  • United Kingdom//ɔːl.təˈɡɛð.ə//
  • United States//ɔl.tuˈɡɛð.ɚ//
  • United States//ˈɔl.təˌɡɛð.ɚ//

Completely, wholly, or without exception.

adverb

  1. 1

    Completely, wholly, or without exception.

    Police did not seem altogether satisfied with my alibi.

    Your advice will be altogether invaluable to me.

    One saint's day in mid-term a certain newly appointed suffragan-bishop came to the school chapel, and there preached on “The Inner Life.” He at once secured attention by his informal method, and when presently the coughing of Jarvis […] interrupted the sermon, he altogether captivated his audience with a remark about cough lozenges being cheap and easily procurable.

    And wordy attacks against slavery drew sneers from observers which were not altogether undeserved. The authors were compared to doctors who offered to a patient nothing more than invectives against the disease which consumed him.

  2. 2

    On the whole; with everything considered.

    Altogether, I'm sorry it happened.

    A sell-out crowd of 10,000 then observed perfectly a period of silence before the team revealed their black armbands, complete with stitched-in poppies, for the match. After FIFA’s about-turn, it must have been a frantic few days for the England kit manufacturer. The on-field challenge was altogether more straightforward.

  3. 3

    With everything included.

    Altogether, your bill comes to $6.99.

  4. 4

    informalAn intensifier: without doubt, clearly.

    It was a great game altogether.

    That took altogether too much time.

Etymology

From Middle English altogeder, altogedere, equivalent to al- (“all”) + together. Cognate with Scots awthegither (“altogether”), Middle High German alzegater (“altogether”), Dutch altegaar. Compare also Old English ealġeador, eallġeador (“altogether”), West Frisian allegearre (“altogether”). More at together. The noun sense (nakedness): was popularized in George du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby.

noun

  1. 1

    datedA state of nakedness.

    And she objects, too, to the "altogether." Her gowns will never be cut more décolleté than those seen in the boxes of the Metropolitan Opera House of New York city.

    Hearing that his wife was posing in the altogether for the great Spanish satirist, the Duke of Alba swore that he would paint Goya's picture in Goya's blood.

    Last week, a Cleveland news anchor, Sharon Reed, was caught on camera stripping nude and joining a gaggle of other people in the altogether.

Forms

plural
altogethers
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).