virtually

Adverb

1. Almost but not quite.
   • With our Medicare supplemental insurance plan, there are virtually no claim forms to fill out. (Advertisement)
   • By surviving the first six minutes Hargreaves matched the total amount of playing time he had managed previously in virtually three years - and by scoring his first goal since April 2008 he set the hosts on their way to...
   • Investors face a quandary. Cash offers a return of virtually zero in many developed countries; government-bond yields may have risen in recent weeks but they are still unattractive. Equities have suffered two big bear...

   Synonyms: as good as more or less nearly practically

   Antonyms: actually

2. In essence or functionally, but not in fact, formally, or technically.
   • virtually a member of the family

   Synonyms: effectively practically

3. Of a subgroup of finite index.
   • In this case W has a diagram with 2 vertices and one edge labelled ∞, and is therefore the infinite dihedral group. Thus W is virtually ℤ. - 1998, Daryl Cooper, D. D. Long, A. W. Reid, “Infinite Coxeter Groups are...
   • In this paper, we are mainly concerned with homogeneity in the class of finitely generated virtually free groups, i.e. finitely generated groups with a free subgroup of finite index. - 2018, Simon André, “Virtually free...
4. Of a covering space of finite degree.
   • Another class of small manifolds consists of those that are not virtually Haken (a manifold is virtually Haken if it is finitely covered by a Haken manifold). - 2002, Steven Boyer, “Dehn surgery on knots” (chapter 4),...
   • We call a hyperplane Y in a VH-complex X virtually clean if there exists a finite-sheeted covering map p : X̂ → X and a connected component Y ⊆ p⁻¹Y such that the hyperplane Ŷ of X̂ is clean. - 2017, Martin R. Bridson,...
5. By computer or in cyberspace.

   Synonyms: cyberly digitally