Idiom
all told
Meaning
With everything included, counted, or summed; in total.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“All told, we have ten people coming to the party.”
“The repairs took three days and cost five hundred dollars, all told.”
“All told, the expedition spanned six months, covered three continents, and resulted in several significant archaeological discoveries.”
Examples
simple
“All told, we have ten people coming to the party.”
contextual
“The repairs took three days and cost five hundred dollars, all told.”
complex
“All told, the expedition spanned six months, covered three continents, and resulted in several significant archaeological discoveries.”
Origin
From *all* + *told*, in which the latter word preserves the now archaic sense of the verb *tell* meaning to count. It is a survival of the original usage found in Middle English, where the act of narration and the act of enumeration were not yet distinct functions.
Key words
Related idioms
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