by rights

Meanings

prepositional phrase

alternativeAlternative form of by right.
He told me not to tell anyone. I suppose that I should not by rights have told you.
1884, H[enry] Rider Haggard, chapter VII, in Dawn […], volume I, London: Hurst and Blackett, […], →OCLC, page 101
4 more examples
Well, whether the gentlemen really do deprive us of any little matters which ought to be ours by rights, I cannot say for certain; but the opinion of the old ones is they do.
1863 October 24, Charles Dickens, “Titbull’s Alms-houses”, in The Uncommercial Traveller, new edition, London: Chapman & Hall, […], published 1866, →OCLC, page 192, column 2
The rest will be speculators, that's men trying to get between you and the oilmen to get some of the money that ought, by rights, come to you.
2007 September 27, Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood, spoken by Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), Los Angeles, Calif.: Paramount Vantage; Miramax Films, →OCLC
By rights I ought to have been lolling in bed this morning, but Nancy was ill and I had to goalkeep for the Second.
2011 February 21, Eilidh Nisbet, “February 1951”, in Giddy Old School: The Diary of a Swot 1948 to 1951, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire: AuthorHouse, →ISBN, page 268
You Keep Fucking Me is one of the highlights of a new exhibition of her paintings, all of them created since her diagnosis with a cancer that should, by rights, have seen her off.
2024 May 29, Simon Hattenstone, “The radical, ravishing rebirth of Tracey Emin: ‘I didn’t want to die as some mediocre YBA’”, in The Guardian, →ISSN