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EVER SO
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I. (adverb)
Sense 1
Meaning:
(intensifier for adjectives) very
Example:
she was ever so friendly
Synonyms:
ever; ever so
Classified under:
Domain usage:
intensifier; intensive (a modifier that has little meaning except to intensify the meaning it modifies)
Context examples:
Men are very safe with us, let them be ever so rich.
(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)
And remember that, if you are ever so forward and clever yourselves, you should always be modest; for, much as you know already, there is a great deal more for you to learn.
(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)
Amongst them all I found not one whom, had I been ever so free, I—warned as I was of the risks, the horrors, the loathings of incongruous unions—would have asked to marry me.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
These distortions actually shift the position of Earth and the pulsars ever so slightly, resulting in a characteristic and detectable signal from the array of celestial lighthouses.
(Listening for Gravitational Waves Using Pulsars, NASA)
If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least.
(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)
I cannot say I admire her taste; and for my part, I was determined from the first not to go, if they pressed me ever so much.
(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)
For although few men will avow their desires of being immortal, upon such hard conditions, yet in the two kingdoms before mentioned, of Balnibarbi and Japan, he observed that every man desired to put off death some time longer, let it approach ever so late: and he rarely heard of any man who died willingly, except he were incited by the extremity of grief or torture.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
That evidence, he observed, was hardly required in so glaring a case, but I am glad of it, and, indeed, none of our judges like to condemn a criminal upon circumstantial evidence, be it ever so decisive.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock.
(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Ever so fur as I went, ever so fur the mountains seemed to shift away from me.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
