From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishfor/to all practical purposesfor/to all practical purposesALMOSTused to say what the real effect of a situation is The time you spend on it doesn’t, for all practical purposes, affect the final result. → practical
Examples from the Corpus
for/to all practical purposes• The edit display screen can only be used, for all practical purposes, for cutting and pasting.• Indeed for all practical purposes he owned us.• Most of the 54 stories reproduced here, even the previously published ones, were, for all practical purposes, lost.• Computerized free language indexing is, for all practical purposes, the same as natural language indexing.• Yet for all practical purposes, Windows was Macintosh.• But, for all practical purposes you can say that a wind angle of 60° produces maximum drift. 