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AS IT WERE
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I. (adverb)
Sense 1
Meaning:
As if it were really so
Example:
she lives here, as it were
Synonyms:
as it were; so to speak
Classified under:
Context examples:
The feeble fingers were never idle, and one of her pleasures was to make little things for the school children daily passing to and fro, to drop a pair of mittens from her window for a pair of purple hands, a needlebook for some small mother of many dolls, penwipers for young penmen toiling through forests of pothooks, scrapbooks for picture-loving eyes, and all manner of pleasant devices, till the reluctant climbers of the ladder of learning found their way strewn with flowers, as it were, and came to regard the gentle giver as a sort of fairy godmother, who sat above there, and showered down gifts miraculously suited to their tastes and needs.
(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)
They say that people who are near death die generally at the change to the dawn or at the turn of the tide; any one who has when tired, and tied as it were to his post, experienced this change in the atmosphere can well believe it.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
However, for the reasons I had offered, but chiefly to gratify the king of Luggnagg by an uncommon mark of his favour, he would comply with the singularity of my humour; but the affair must be managed with dexterity, and his officers should be commanded to let me pass, as it were by forgetfulness.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
The first sight that was presented to your eyes was the body of your friend, murdered in so unaccountable a manner and placed, as it were, by some fiend across your path.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
Each man seemed stunned—deeply contemplative, as it were, and, not quite sure, trying to realize just what had taken place.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
He is, as it were suddenly, grown very old.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation, that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner—something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were—she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy, little children.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
Nor was that all, for crawling together on flat tables of rock or letting themselves drop into the sea with loud reports I beheld huge slimy monsters—soft snails, as it were, of incredible bigness—two or three score of them together, making the rocks to echo with their barkings.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
I was merely going on the idea that if the silver had been taken by persons who did not want it—who merely took it for a blind, as it were—then they would naturally be anxious to get rid of it.
(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Am I to take it that I have anything in common with him, so that we are, as it were, to stand together; or has he to gain from me some good so stupendous that my well-being is needful to him?
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
