ultimately
Britishadverb
Explanation
Ultimately means "at the very end of the process." Your strategy of robbing banks with a water gun worked a few times, but ultimately it was unsuccessful. Use ultimately when you want to stress that there are many different elements of something, but in the end there's one clear conclusion. The city parks department might listen to everyone's ideas for what to do with that empty lot, but ultimately they'll do whatever they think will serve the city best. Ultimately comes from the Latin ultimāre, meaning, lying at the very end.
Vocabulary lists containing ultimately
Tuesdays with Morrie
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Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
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Obama, on the 50th anniversary of 'Bloody Sunday'
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
It was opponents' efforts there that ultimately led to this defeat.
From BBC ● Sep. 11, 2026
The new results suggest that collapse models may contain clues about how quantum physics, gravity, and time could ultimately fit together.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 11, 2026
That sparked ultimately unsuccessful environmental challenges to the relocation plan, citing risks to marine life such as the endangered dugong, a relative of the manatee.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 11, 2026
At the most basic level, a fever is the body’s response to something unknown, the beginning of a complex process that targets an infection to ultimately kill it.
From Salon ● Sep. 11, 2026
This was the missing link in Darwin's logic: reproductive incompatibility, ultimately derived from genetic incompatibility, drove the origin of novel species.
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
