next to

1. Beside, alongside, by, adjacent to, or near.

   Cleanliness is next to godliness.

   1 more example

   Would you mind if I sit next to you?

2. Immediately after, in choice or consideration; aside from.

   “Next to you, I'm all Lani has,” she confided. “But you knew that already, too, right?” He should have. That message came loud and clear. “She loves flowers, did you know that?” Jennie asked.

   2016, Jill Shalvis, The Bachelor's Bed, Harlequin, →ISBN

   1 more example

   The living room was the main gathering spot in Fine Manor, and next to that the most used room was the dining room, where, on Sunday nights, Larry and Mabel hosted card games, penny-ante poker nights, and even bingo nights...

   2006, Steve Cox, Jim Terry, One Fine Stooge: Larry Fine's Frizzy Life in Pictures : an Authorized Biography, Cumberland House Publishing, →ISBN, page 59

3. Compared to, in comparison with.

   As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs.

   2013 August 10, “A new prescription”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8848

   1 more example

   This last he explained to me once, though the explanation didn't matter much, not next to the feeling of those low hairy clouds and the sea bashing itself against the shore. The explanation, in fact, made the poem less wonderful, ...

   2002, Michael Hettich, Greatest hits, 1987-2001, Pudding House Publications, →ISBN, page 5

comparative more next to · superlative most next to

1. Almost; nearly, well-nigh.

   The job paid next to nothing.

   2 more examples

   It is next to impossible to get him to admit it, but he writes very well.

   The Puritans who groaned under it, and so bitterly resisted when it was administered at the hands of bishops, forgot, or never knew, that it was invented, or next to invented, by the episcopal founder of Nonconformity.

   1885, Richard Watson Dixon, History of the Church of England: From the Abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction, page 465