Dictionary

only too en · ADV

Meanings

1. (before adjective, not-comparable) very, all too.
   • I'll be only too happy to help.
   • In a crisis I am only too well aware that I am always left to find a way out, but that night I felt hardly adequate even to ordinary conversation 1922, Stephen McKenna, The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman:
   • After some miles of country lanes he reached the high road, and as he turned into it and glanced along its white length, he saw approaching him a speck that turned into a dot and then into a blob, and then into something very familiar; and a double note of warning, only too well known, fell on his delighted ear. 1913, Kenneth Grahame, chapter 10, in The Wind in the Willows:
   • I'm only too keen to leave school.
2. (before adverb, not-comparable) to a high degree; very well or very much
   • You understand?” “Only too well.” Sudhir said wryly. 2014, Trina Chako, Sisters:
   • Cities were not built to handle this volume of last-mile activity – a fact that firms such as UPS realise only too well. 2019 November 21, Samanth Subramanian, “How our home delivery habit reshaped the world”, in The Guardian:

Relateds

fully well · full well