all

   Used collectively to a group of people. ‘I’m afraid I really must be off’, says Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, ‘Goodbye, all.’ A customer entering a pub in Britain is likely to greet those present with ‘Evening, all.’ All may also be added to a plural vocative expression to round it off, though such usage is now rather archaic. ‘Take your places, my dear friends all,’ says Zenobia, in The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

   It is more often used in modern times as a prefix, followed by a noun, as in a call put out by a central radio operator to ‘all cars’. ‘All-stations’ is in Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming. ‘All you flies out there’, in Georgy Girl, by Margaret Forster, is addressed to a group of children who have been told to come into the room as flies by a dancing teacher. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, has a boy addressing a group of younger boys as ‘all you littluns’. A deeply religious man in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers, uses ‘all ye disconsolate and sore of heart’.