yes and no
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Meaning · English
An answer that is both affirmative and negative
Where it’s used:
Used
Widespread English
Examples
Now having said the answer is both yes and no, of course part of the reason for the yes and the no is there is a very large overlap between domestic policy and foreign policy.
Bung in a card, plug in to the LAN, and your humble workaday PC has become a sexy, hi - tech LANstation.
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.
Common questions
What does “yes and no” mean?
An answer that is both affirmative and negative
Is “yes and no” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.