Everything

Part of speech: pronoun

Pronunciation: /ˈɛvɹiθɪŋ/

Definitions

1. All things taken collectively; the whole of existence or a particular situation
2. All entities, concepts, or circumstances considered as a complete aggregate
3. the entirety of life, objects, or situations present in a context

Etymology: "Everything" began as two separate words that English speakers simply stopped writing apart. In Middle English, "every thing" was a phrase: "every" modified "thing" just as it would in "every book" or "every day," and each item in the group was picked out individually. Over time the two words fused into a single unit, a process linguists call univerbation, so the compound came to name the whole collection at once rather than its members one by one. The shift is easiest to see in the sense of the parts. "Every" originally meant "each of all," stressing the individual members of a set, while "thing" was a broad word for any object, matter or affair. Fused together, they lost the sense of counting items and gained the sense of totality, so that "everything" now refers to the entire set without listing it. The spelling settled into one word as the compound became a standard pronoun.

Synonyms: all, the whole lot, the entire thing

Antonyms: nothing