by the way
Prepositional phrase
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Prepositional phrase
- (conjunctive, speech act, idiomatic) Incidentally; a parenthetical statement not timely, central, or crucial to the topic at hand; foregone, passed by, something that has already happened.
- Synonyms: apropos, BTW, by the by, incidentally
- 1853, Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener, in Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories, New York: Penguin Books, 1968; reprint 1995 as Bartleby, ISBN 0 14 60.0012 9, p.2:
- […] I had counted on a life-lease of the profits, whereas I only received those of a few short years. But this is by the way.
- His mother will be coming for dinner tomorrow, and, by the way, she volunteered to bring dessert.
- French: soit dit en passant, tout bien considéré; at beginning of a sentence: à propos, au fait, d'ailleurs
- German: apropos, nebenbei, übrigens
- Italian: a proposito, incidentalmente, per caso
- Portuguese: a propósito, aliás, por sinal, diga-se de passagem, já agora
- Russian: кста́ти
- Spanish: por cierto, a propósito, dicho sea de paso, depaso
by the way (not comparable)
- (UK, idiomatic) Irrelevantly, off-topic.
This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.002