Anything
adv, noun, pron, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 Someone or something of importance.
"How long does it take to turn you actors into good anythings?"
- 1 Used as a placeholder verb for any verb out of a set of related verbs. ambitransitive, colloquial
"He wasn't cooking, he wasn't sweeping, he wasn't anythinging!"
- 1 In any way, any extent or any degree. not-comparable
"That isn't anything like a car."
- 1 Any object, act, state, event, or fact whatsoever; a thing of any kind; something or other.
"I would not do it for anything."
- 2 Expressing an indefinite comparison.
"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."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"I won't ask you anything else today."
Etymology
From Middle English anything, enything, onything, from Late Old English aniþing, from earlier ǣniġ þing (literally “any thing”), equivalent to any + thing.
From Middle English anything, enything, onything, onythynge, from Old English ǣniġe þinga, ǣnġi þinga (literally “by any of things”), from ǣniġe, instrumental form of ǣniġ (“any”) + þinga, genitive plural of þing (“thing”).
Related phrases
More for "anything"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.