in so many words

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Idioms and Phrases

In those precise words; also, plainly, directly. For example, He didn't tell me in so many words, but I understood that he planned to apply , or, as Charles Dickens put it in Sketches by “Boz” (1836): “That the Lord Mayor had threatened in so many words to pull down the London Bridge.” [Late 1600s]

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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

Allegedly, Romanians saw an American oil tycoon enjoying easy access to nice cars and other possessions and thought, in so many words, "Why can't that be me?"

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Well, said the judge in so many words, now let politicians suck up their own medicine.

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It said, in so many words, they had been wrongly accused of being “kingpins” and did not deserve their 20-year sentences.

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One's immediate reaction is entirely reasonable: he blurts out in so many words that he doesn’t know what “pansexual” means.

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News flash: Republicans haven’t said it in so many words, but they seem to have a new line of attack against President Biden: He suffers from dissociative identity disorder.

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

insolvent in some measure

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