present company excepted
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Meaning · English
Excluding the people currently present
Literally: present group excluded
Where it’s used:
Used
Widespread English
Examples
Present company, of course, excepted.
Nutty raised an army of smelly Brits while I was away (present company excepted) and I fear a civil war.
British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)
Sources & notes
Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-31; pending editor spot-check.
Common questions
What does “present company excepted” mean?
Excluding the people currently present Literally: present group excluded
Is “present company excepted” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.