English · Word pair Candidate

once and for all

Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.

Both English Tiếng Việt

Meaning · English

Finally and completely, putting an end to all debate or uncertainty

Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt

cuối cùng và hoàn toàn, kết thúc mọi tranh luận hoặc sự không chắc chắn

Machine-translated — suggest a fix

Literally: one time forever

Where it’s used: Used Widespread English

Examples

Mr Donovan's mere financial gain will probably make little difference to him and it is debatable whether his name ‘ has been cleared once and for all’ as it did not need clearing in the first place.

Will someone please decide once and for all what we can eat and drink!

British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)

Sources & notes

Listed on Wikipedia “Irreversible binomial” (CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-29). Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-30; pending editor spot-check.

Equivalents & related

Near equivalent vĩnh viễn (adverb) permanently; for ever; for good; once and for all Tiếng Việt

Common questions

What does “once and for all” mean?

Finally and completely, putting an end to all debate or uncertainty Literally: one time forever

Is “once and for all” formal or informal?

No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.

What is the closest equivalent?

“vĩnh viễn” (Tiếng Việt) — near equivalent.