as often as not

Language: en

Meaning: (idiomatic)More or lesshalf of the time; on many occasions but notalways;frequently.Coordinate terms:more often than not;see alsoThesaurus:usually,Thesaurus:frequency1841,Charles Dickens, chapter 7, inThe Old Curiosity Shop:"[T]hese old people—there's no trusting them, Fred. . . . [Y]ou can't calculate upon 'em, and even then they deceive you justas often as not."1896,Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Persons of the Tale”, inFables:"I am a man that tries to do his duty, and makes a mess of itas often as not."1910,H. G. Wells, chapter 7, inThe History of Mr. Polly:[I]f he discovered a sale where there were books he wouldas often as notwaste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them.1918,Edgar Wallace, chapter 7, inThe Man Who Knew:The hall porter said that,as often as not, the flat was untenanted.2012October 24, Eamon Javers, “Spies and Co.”, inNew York Times, retrieved29 October 2013:As often as not, the perpetrators have been other Americans — motivated not by patriotism for a foreign flag, but by simple profit.

Examples:Note: the examples for non latin scripts have a high likelihood of mistakes, we do not own any of this data and it is sourced from Wiktionary, the NLLB database and Opensubtitles. Please help us improve this by contributing correct examples. We will be working to fix this issue over time however it is a bigger issue due to the the difficulties in dealing with non latin scripts and grammatical structures(non-romantic/european languages have lower resources as well ).

Validation Count: 0

Sourced from Wiktionary