Meanings
- In spite of, despite.
For all his protests, he was forced to have a bath.
3 more examples
For all that she was of exceptional intellectual enterprise, she had never yet considered these things with unaverted eyes.
1909, H. G. Wells, Ann VeronicaMaguire made an horrendous meal of the most basic piece of work to make it a treble helping of dreadful defending by England and for all the flair and fantasy of their attacking play there is no hiding away from the fact this is a serious weakness.
2019 September 10, Phil McNulty, “'England horribly fallible in defence' against Kosovo in Euro 2020 qualifying”, in BBC SportCollins' death can be put down to his devil-may-care attitude—his decision to journey through hostile territory in a large convoy, the inadequate choice of the members of the convoy, and the tactics he adopted in the ambush. For all the debate about ballistics and entry and exit wounds, and the use of powerful historical imaginations, it matters more that Collins was killed than how he was killed. Concentration on the events at Béal na mBláth has, moreover, often meant a failure to place them in the overall context of the war.
1988, Michael Hopkinson, Green Against Green: The Irish Civil War - literallymathematicsApplying to every element of a set; the universal quantifier ∀.
For all x in A, x² is even.
Synonyms: for any, given any, given an arbitrary
Synonyms & antonyms
prepositional phraseApplying to every element of a set; the universal quantifier ∀.
Cite this entry
for all. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/for%20all
“for all.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/for%20all. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “for all,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/for%20all.
Source: for all on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.