by all accounts

• First attested in 1798.

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by all accounts

1. (literally) According to all available accounts or reports.
   • 1881, Francis Beaufort Palmer, Company precedents, for use in relation to companies subject to the Companies acts 1862 to 1880. With copious notes., page 512:

     […] and also by all accounts of the surplus which shall from time to time be settled between the new company and the liquidators of the old company […]

2. (idiomatic) According to everything that people have said.
   • 1878, Charles Dickens, All Year Round, page 161:

     The reputation of the elder Baron, although by all accounts justly merited, was destined to be completely thrown into the shade by that of his son […]

   • 1887, William Carleton, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, page 302:

     […] that they say, by all accounts, it costs him great trouble to make, by rason that he must fast a long time, and pray by the day, afore he gets himself […]

   • 2007, Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, →ISBN, page 272:

     I sent the particulars to the ship-builder, and by all accounts the news killed him, for he died not long after.

   • 2021 December 29, Stephen Roberts, “Stories and facts behind railway plaques Cheltenham (1928)”, in RAIL, number 947, page 60:

     The society had apparently been formed the previous year, but as the Cheltenham Spa Railway Society, which sounded rather parochial and unambitious - particularly as (by all accounts) its founders had gathered in a garden shed in the town.

• “by all accounts”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.