From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishfor all practical purposesfor all practical purposes (also to all intents and purposes)ALMOST used to say that something is so close to the truth that it can be considered to be the truth The war, to all intents and purposes, was over. We have a secretary of state for Scotland who is for all practical purposes a Scottish prime minister. → purpose
Examples from the Corpus
for all practical purposes• For all practical purposes, the cleanup of the oil spill is complete.• For all practical purposes, the country is bankrupt.• But, for all practical purposes you can say that a wind angle of 60° produces maximum drift.• Indeed for all practical purposes he owned us.• Computerized free language indexing is, for all practical purposes, the same as natural language indexing.• The edit display screen can only be used, for all practical purposes, for cutting and pasting.• Most of the 54 stories reproduced here, even the previously published ones, were, for all practical purposes, lost.• Yet for all practical purposes, Windows was Macintosh. 