all told

British  

adverb

1. (sentence modifier) taking every one into account; in all

   we were seven all told

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all told Idioms  

1. Added up, in summation, as in The ferry will hold 80 passengers all told, or All told, his proposal makes some good points. This idiom, first recorded in 1850, uses the verb tell in the sense of “count.”

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

all told

The financial-services firms Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab all told MarketWatch there have been notable increases in the number of youth investment accounts opened in recent years.

From MarketWatch ● Jan. 28, 2026

Executives at BP and every other oil company all told me they never thought that something like the Deepwater blowout could happen.

From Slate ● Jan. 14, 2026

Some of it was pedestrian: He released around 130 albums, all told, and not everything can be a masterpiece.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2025

Niven’s solution was to eschew the “usual boring, chronological history” and structure “Sound N’ Fury” more like a collection of vignettes, all told with his usual dry sense of humor and razor-sharp wit.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 23, 2025

The teachers all told me I was going to have four hours of homework a night, but I didn’t believe it—plus I believed I could handle it.

From "It’s Kind of a Funny Story" by Ned Vizzini