adverb

• Until now or until the point in time under discussion.

  ‘hitherto part of French West Africa, Benin achieved independence in 1960’

  More example sentences

  • ‘As someone who has hitherto needed to reject one thing before moving on to another, Juliet is on her mettle, and she knows it.’
  • ‘He was billeted at her home where her seven brothers had hitherto protected her from any approach by potential suitors.’
  • ‘McLeish is now secure enough in his own position to be able to straight bat these, hitherto, distractions.’
  • ‘Perhaps it is a hitherto uncovered area of Swinney's policy revolution.’
  • ‘Was it a smoke screen for some secret hitherto undisclosed strategy?’
  • ‘But he has unwittingly made plain what only a few radicals and Marxists have hitherto suspected.’
  • ‘The way is hard and long, but I feel that we have been set upon the right road towards that hitherto unreachable Nirvana.’
  • ‘He discovered a hitherto undetected fracture and packed me off to North Shore Hospital.’
  • ‘The DVD also contains 20 minutes of hitherto unseen footage and four extra tracks.’
  • ‘The company has launched a project to bring wines hitherto unknown in Hong Kong on to the market there.’
  • ‘Preliminary results already suggest the battle was fought over a much bigger area than hitherto suspected.’
  • ‘That may be because, hitherto, it has been a hard building to envisage.’
  • ‘Some days yield nothing by way of new information and fresh leads, while others open avenues hitherto blocked.’
  • ‘Another factor hitherto unnoticed now comes into the force, tipping the balance.’
  • ‘They were forced to call on the coalition partners whose presence they had hitherto ignored.’
  • ‘The galvanising effect on the hitherto moribund Mavericks was immediate.’
  • ‘Yet their forwards finally found a bit of tempo and Rory Lawson began to make linkages which had hitherto been absent.’
  • ‘When he returns, the new firm will be due to launch and he'll be out looking for the bigger deals that have hitherto eluded him.’
  • ‘New technology means it is worthwhile extracting oil from fields hitherto economically unviable.’
  • ‘We soon discovered why that part of town was hitherto unknown to me.’

  Synonyms

  previously, formerly, earlier, so far, thus far, before, beforehand, to date, as yet

  View synonyms