at once


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at once

1. Immediately. I need you to call me at once—we have an urgent matter to discuss. The boss wants you to start working on this report at once. You need to get to the hospital at once—the doctors think Uncle Ed won't make it through the night.
2. At the same time. Don't try to carry more than two boxes at once—they're heavy! I can't understand a word with all of you screaming at once. Well, I can't do two things at once, so let me wrap this up, then I'll go find that file you need.
See also: once
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2024 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.

at once

immediately; right now. We must leave at once! You must come here at once; it is an emergency.
See also: once
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

at once

1. At the same time, as in We can't all fit into the boat at once. [First half of 1200s] Also see at one time, def. 1.
2. Immediately, as in Mother told the children to come inside at once. [First half of 1500s]
See also: once
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer. Copyright © 2003, 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

at ˈonce


1 immediately: I’m afraid there’s a problem. I must ask you to leave the building at once.
2 at the same time: Don’t all speak at once! ♢ I’m not superwoman, you know. I can’t do a hundred things at once.
See also: once
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary © Farlex 2017

at once

1. All at one time; simultaneously: Everything happened at once. The view of the skyline is at once awesome, grand, and disappointing.
2. Immediately; instantly: Leave the room at once.
See also: once
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
See also:
References in classic literature ?
He went back at once and carried them to the grand-vizir as he had promised.
View in context
"I shall fall down!" flashed through his mind, but the unknown began to speak and he recovered himself at once.
While they were knocking and talking together, the idea several times occurred to him to end it all at once and shout to them through the door.
If anyone had come into his room then, he would have jumped up at once and screamed.
View in context
The ventrilo-quized sound track at once reemphasized the distancing obsolescence of both machines and made felt their effusively physical presence.
Rodney Graham: 303 Gallery
If that slippage had happened all at once, seismic instruments would have measured a magnitude-6.8 quake.
The silent type: Pacific Northwest hit routinely by nonquakes
The second panel presented a nude female torso, its pubic hair shaved away to expose a slit of flesh that seemed at once a gash or wound caused by the adjacent beak but also, in its sharp parallel lines, a visual analog to the beak, thus rendering the implied meaning of the photograph indeterminate: Is woman sexual victim or castrator, innocent recipient of male violence or cause of it?
"Hitchcock and art: Fatal coincidences": Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
The country lacks political direction, he argues, not because voters are ambivalent but because politicians with various political beliefs are tugging it in a hundred different directions at once.
The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office
It gets really disorienting, especially when a half-dozen characters are on-screen at once.
TOP TEN
But to want to repeat it, to come back to it!" These works, like his renderings of phantasmic heads and other quasi-figurative works of the '40s (by which time he'd returned to the use of a white ground, though only on the condition that it be sufficiently soaked for his inks and watercolors to merge with it), clearly parallel Michaux's books of this era, which describe invented cultures, at once extending and parodying his own imaginative travel writings.
Henri Michaux
With its fetal spirit-children and gnarled oak tree becoming at once a monstrous hand, foot, and head, it provided a grandly orchestrated finale for Surrealism's regressions to our roots in infancy and nature.
Pavel Tchelitchew
Or, to put it another way, the viewer is already part of the work itself: the same person takes on the role of producer, product, and receiver at once. Welcome to Nauman's land.
Bruce Nauman
And as the flag freezes in mid wave, time appears to stop: our cosmic biker stands on the threshold of eternity, yet he perceives only the same nagging contradiction--paradise at once found and lost, a world perched at both the beginning and the end of history, a garden of dust.
Hi-yo silver: Cady Noland's America
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