Idiom
nothing if not
Meaning
Certainly; definitely; (sometimes also obliquely) thoroughly; wholly; to a high degree; extremely.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“He is nothing if not persistent.”
“The politician is nothing if not ambitious, as she has already started planning her next campaign.”
“The professor was nothing if not thorough, spending hours correcting every minor error in our lengthy research papers.”
Examples
simple
“He is nothing if not persistent.”
contextual
“The politician is nothing if not ambitious, as she has already started planning her next campaign.”
complex
“The professor was nothing if not thorough, spending hours correcting every minor error in our lengthy research papers.”
Origin
The phrase asserts the truth of a statement by the literal claim that the alternative is void. The construction functions as a formal insistence, suggesting that if the quality in question were absent, nothing of the subject would remain.
Key words
Related idioms
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