Meaning of to oneself | Babel Free

Definitions

Tending not to interact with others; introverted; reserved.

informal

Equivalents

Examples

“John was very shy and to himself when he went to school that day.”

“At the centre of Stalin’s superiority over his competitors was certainly his intense will, just as Napoleon ranked what he called ‘moral fortitude’ higher in a general than genius or experience. When Milovan Djilas said to Stalin during the Yugoslav-Soviet discussions in Moscow during the war that the Serbian politician Gavrilović was ‘a shrewd man’, Stalin commented, as though to himself: ‘Yes, there are politicians who think shrewdness is the main thing in politics. . . .’⁴⁴ His was a will-power taken to a logical extreme. There is something non-human about his almost total lack of normal restraints upon it.”

CEFR level