anything
/ˈɛn.i.θɪŋ/
Word Rarity
Common
Frequency: 5.55 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
3
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
pron
noun
Example Sentences
- "I would not do it for anything."
- "Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language […] his clerks […] understood him very well. If he had written a love letter, or a farce, or a ballade, or a story, no one, either clerks, or friends, or compositors, would have understood anything but a word here and a word there."
- "In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up rate was 0.1%. And for online adverts the “conversion” into sales was a minuscule 0.01%."
- "Perhaps it was this atmosphere of misplacedness and loneliness as much as anything which led her to speak to him one evening in early summer when the office had closed."
- "How long does it take to turn you actors into good anythings?"
- "So we tried not to talk about first or second anythings until our meeting with the rabbi."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *ís? Proto-Indo-European *h₁óynos Proto-Indo-European *-kos Proto-Indo-European *h₁oy-no-kós Proto-Germanic *ainagaz Proto-West Germanic *ainag Old English ǣniġ Proto-Indo-European *tenk-? Proto-Indo-European *tenkóm Proto-Germanic *þingą Proto-West Germanic *þing Old English þing Old English aniþing Middle English anything English anything From Middle English anything, enything, onything, from Late Old English aniþing, from earlier ǣniġ þing (literally “any thing”), equivalent to any + thing.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: anything, aniþing, ǣniġe þinga
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈɛn.i.θɪŋ/
- British English: /ˈɛn.ɪ.θɪŋ/