Nevertheless

How to spell nevertheless

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce nevertheless

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nevertheless mean?

1. adverbIn spite of what has just been said or done; all the same.

Nevertheless in a sentence

• The report was late; nevertheless, the committee accepted it.

• The journey was long and tiring; nevertheless, she arrived in good spirits.

Where does nevertheless come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a fusion of three native English elements: never, the, and less, all inherited from Old English. It descends from a phrase that in earlier English ran as 'never the less', where 'the' was the old instrumental form meaning 'by that amount' and 'less' meant 'smaller'. The whole expression therefore meant something close to 'not made any smaller by that', that is, 'still true in spite of what was just said'. It was used as a flowing three word phrase throughout the Middle English period and gradually hardened into a single solid word by around the 1500s. The same building blocks survive in the parallel phrase 'none the less', which keeps the spaces that nevertheless eventually lost, and remembering that hidden 'never the less' makes the spelling far easier to reconstruct.

How the word is built

• never (not ever)
• the (instrumental 'the')
• less (smaller, fewer); literally 'never the less' fused into one word