at one time or another

Idioms  

1. On various separate occasions. For example, At one time or another I've considered replacing the furnace, but so far I haven't done so. [Early 1600s]

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Example Sentences

In all of this, he’s getting at something powerful but hard to quantify that we all perhaps have felt, if only briefly, at one time or another.

From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 4, 2026

Some 70 percent of the city's children were evacuated at one time or another, either abroad or to the west of Ukraine.

From Barron's • Dec. 17, 2025

It would appear that he's tried them all at one time or another depending on the challenge staring him in the face.

From BBC • Oct. 20, 2025

In recent weeks, there has been ongoing national debate during which each of those three prospects has been touted at one time or another as being the best overall or most promising or surest thing.

From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 23, 2024

We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis.

From "The Lives of a Cell" by Lewis Thomas