virtually

adv

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 a fifth win of the season in all competitions.”

   “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 markets since 2000 and are wobbling again. It is hardly surprising that pension funds, insurers and endowments are searching for new sources of return.”

2. In essence or functionally, but not in fact, formally, or technically.

   “virtually a member of the family”

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.”

   “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.”

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).”

   “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.”

5. By computer or in cyberspace.